At this point, it seems unlikely that Trump is going to prevail in his legal challenges.
It's possible that he will, but what do you think is more likely? If he doesn't prevail,
however, Biden's "win" can actually be a tremendous win for us.
Why? Well, first let's address the question of who "we" are. I hate to sound like Joe Biden,
who seems not to know who he is or where he is or what he's talking about from moment to moment
(get ready for four years of hilarity, folks). But it's useful to remind ourselves of who we
are from time to time. We are White Nationalists.
A White Nationalist is
someone who believes that white peoples have a right to their own homelands. So that, as a
White Nationalist, I am a German nationalist, an English nationalist, a Scottish nationalist, a
French nationalist, etc . Or, at least, I support all those nationalisms. To be a white
nationalist in America is really to recognize that the core "American people" are the white
people whose ancestors built the country and who continue to pay for it. Thus, American White
Nationalism = American nationalism. To be an American nationalist is also to recognize that
more recent, non-white arrivals don't belong here at all; and that while our blacks have been
here a long time and some of them do sing, dance, and dribble well, they are mostly parasites
who contribute almost nothing to the society except grief.
Since it now looks impossible to go back to the good old days when we had blacks in complete
subjection, and since both blacks and browns out-breed us, American nationalists essentially
face two possible courses of action. The first is to remove non-whites from the country, which
seems impossible at this point, or to remove ourselves. This latter course would mean that we
all go back to Europe, which the Europeans won't allow, or that we effectively secede from the
USA and carve out our own white space (or spaces) within North America. It is this latter
option that now seems like it may be our only option, and something we must work
toward.
So, how does Trump's loss help advance us in that goal? To state the obvious, white
Americans will never work toward a white American homeland unless they are aware of
themselves as White Americans; unless they see themselves as a group with distinct
interests, and the moral right to assert those interests. "Awakening" white people has
always been our goal as White Nationalists -- awakening whites in America, and in
Europe. This awakening is far more important than any political figure, or any short-term
political goals. This awakening is and ought to be our top priority.
When I first got involved in this movement, almost exactly twenty years ago, there were two
questions that were constantly raised in my local "hate group": (1) When are white people going
to wake up? And (2) will it take some kind of societal collapse to get them to wake up? Most of
us thought that it would take such a collapse, but that this wouldn't happen in our lifetimes.
Well, my friends, now it has happened. The collapse has occurred, and Trump's loss has
brought it about.
The country was already fractured along political lines. Now it is completely broken.
Conservatives, the overwhelming majority of whom are white, have long known that the media are
biased to the Left and that the political establishment does not have their interests at heart.
But they still believed in "the system." They believed that it still might be possible to work
within the system and get somebody elected who would actually be their guy . Somebody
who could bring the jobs home, stop the tide of non-white immigration, clean up the streets (
i.e. , do something about black crime), combat the politically correct madness, and get
us out of the forever wars. The election of Donald Trump seemed to confirm this optimism.
But all the voices on the far-Right who labeled Trump "a distraction" have now been proved
correct. Trump actually wound up doing little for white people -- despite being continually
vilified by the Left as a white supremacist! Still, millions of whites not only continued to
support him, they carried on a love affair with the man. Trump was adored by his base like no
other American political figure in memory. Not even Reagan got this much love. The more vicious
and unhinged the attacks on Trump became, the more his base supported him. They knew that his
reelection would be no cakewalk, but they believed it was still possible.
They knew that the media and the Democrats would play dirty -- very dirty. But they trusted
the electoral process. Or, at least, they hoped for the best. For months there was talk about
voter fraud, primarily focused on the issue of mail-in ballots. But conservative whites still
had faith that the system would work for them, as it did in 2016.
Now their faith has been completely and irreparably shattered. And this is hugely
significant for us.
The first step toward real secession is psychological secession: seeing that though I
still live in it, this is no longer my country, and there is no longer any hope of making the
system work for me and those like me. This is exactly what the 2020 election has accomplished.
About 57% of white people voted for Trump in this election. And those many millions of whites
are now choking down a gigantic red pill. As we all know, the red pill is the path to
liberation.
Quoth Tyler Durden: "Losing all hope was freedom."
It seems that there is credible evidence that there was voter fraud in the election,
benefitting Biden. As I write this, Trump's legal team is preparing to fight it -- but, as I
have already said, I think that they will lose. Ultimately, it does not matter whether or not
there was fraud, or whether the fraud was enough to swing the election to Biden (two separate
issues). What matters is that white Trump voters believe that there was.
Trump voters are now, ironically, in sort of the same position as Democrats in the wake of
2016. No matter how much we would like to, none of us will ever forget the "Russian
interference!" and "Russia collusion!" hysteria that went on for the better part of two and a
half years, until the Mueller report more or less put the thing out of its misery (though not
entirely). The difference, however, is that that was all bullshit. And a significant number of
Democrats knew it. Trump voters actually have very good reasons to think that this election was
stolen.
Regardless of what we eventually learn about whether sharpies can cause ballots to be
misread, or whether a "glitch" flipped Trump votes to Biden votes, there is still ample reason
for the 70 million Trump voters to think that this thing was rigged. In the months preceding
the election, America saw a massive overreach of state and local government power in the form
of COVID lockdowns, the net effect of which was to ruin far more lives than it saved. Is it
paranoia to think that the intention here was to crash the economy and render Trump
unelectable?Consider: Virtually the entire media was not only against Trump, but made it their
personal mission to take him down by any means necessary. No lie, no distortion was too
ridiculous or too scurrilous. Leftists in government, journalism, academia, and the
entertainment industry openly declared that anything and everything was permissible in
order to take down the "existential threat" posed by Orange Man. This was the fertile ground
onto which were sowed the seeds of speculation about election fraud.
The lockdowns coincided with months of coordinated rioting billed as "protests" against
non-existent "racial injustice." The rioters somehow weren't subject to the rules of the
lockdowns, because apparently COVID takes a holiday when it is politically expedient. This
double standard was so obscene and so blatant, it enraged Republican voters (as well as a few
honest rank and file Democrats of my acquaintance).
The Left calculated, correctly, that Trump would do little or nothing to stop the rioting,
out of fear of looking too dictatorial in an election year. Trump's own calculation was that
allowing the riots to happen would give the Left plenty of rope with which to hang itself.
Trump was wrong; his inaction made him seem weak. The basic hope of the Left was that months of
economic and social chaos would fatally wound Trump, and that voters would be too stupid to see
that it was actually the Left that was to blame for it. In the main, it looks like they were
right about this.
But diehard Trump supporters correctly saw that the lockdowns and riots were an election
year strategy hatched by the Left. If they were not wholly designed by the Left to
damage Trump, they were at least manipulated for that purpose. The cherry on the cake came in
the weeks leading up to the election, in the form of big tech's censorship of news damaging to
Biden, including blocking the New York Post 's stories about Biden's involvement in his
son's shady business deals. This classically Orwellian move finally reached an extreme few
would ever have even thought possible, when at last social media began censoring the President
himself.
Given all of this, it would be unreasonable not to think that this election was
stolen. Trump's supporters believe this -- every last one of them. And they will never stop
believing it. Mark my words: this is never, ever going away. Trump voters will go to
their graves believing that the election was stolen, and feeling as passionately about it as
they do right now, less than a week after polls closed. They will go to their graves hating
Leftists (as they rightfully should), and believing that the system is broken beyond
repair.
"But," so your objection will go, "the fact that these white Trump voters will become
disillusioned with the system does not mean that they will become self-aware white
advocates."
My contention, however, is that what begins as disillusionment with the system will, in many
cases (a great many cases, I believe) lead to increasing racial consciousness, or open the door
to it. Take it from me -- from my own personal experience: once you have accepted that
one big thing is a total sham, you begin to wonder whether everything else is. And if
you keep going this way, you eventually begin wondering whether wrong is right; whether
everything we've ever been told is false and bad might be true and good.
And the fact is that white Trump voters are already far more racially aware than the
naysayers in the comments section will give them credit for. Trumpism is an implicitly white
phenomenon if ever there was one. And it is implicit only in the sense that its supporters are
too tactful and too fearful to name it for what it is -- not in the sense that they are
unaware of what it is. We all thought that the media and the Leftists had lost their
minds when they damned Trump and his supporters as racists and white supremacists. But they
weren't crazy. They grasped, much more clearly than Republicans, what the vector of the
Trump movement was -- where it might be headed. They correctly saw that a movement that offered
a home to millions of white Americans upset by non-white immigration (euphemistically called
"illegal immigration") might eventually give birth to self-aware white advocacy. When they
called the Trumpites "racists" it was like seeing the oak tree in the acorn.
As perceptive as the Left was on that particular score, they have, as we all know, been
remarkably deaf, dumb, and blind in other ways. Biden's share of the popular vote (if
legitimate) is by no means a landslide. There is no "mandate" for looney Leftism, and no
"repudiation" of Trump (indeed, Trump did expand his base -- though in one crucial area, as I
will shortly discuss, it shrank). But that won't stop Leftists like AOC, and many others, from
imagining that they have a mandate for all their craziness.
Therefore, expect the anti-white rhetoric to pick up steam. And, needless to say, this will
help the process along in a big way: white Trump voters will think for five minutes and realize
that they are at the mercy of a system that is demonstrably rigged against them and
wills their destruction. If they haven't realized it already. That image of the McCloskeys with
their guns facing down the brown hoard is unlikely to fade anytime soon. And what happened to
the McCloskeys has now happened to all white Americans: despised, cornered, and now disarmed.
(The literal disarmament is right around the corner, if the runoff elections in Georgia deliver
the Senate to the Democrats.)
We are nevertheless still at a point where whiteness remains implicit. Whites dare not speak
out in their own defense -- not explicitly as whites, anyway. Populist journalists like Tucker
Carlson, Ann Coulter, and Pat Buchanan, who are privately on our side, still speak in coded
language, avoiding open advocacy for whites. However, the coded language (as the Left also
correctly sees) is becoming easier to decode by the day. As many on our side have said, we will
make no real and substantial progress until we are willing to openly stand up for ourselves --
in person, in broad daylight, and without sock puppets and noms de plume like "Jef
Costello." Is that day imminent? I believe that it is.
What would it take? First, it would take white self-awareness -- and I have argued that this
is already there, emerging from its cocoon. Second, it would take anger . It would take
whites being pushed to a point where they are so angry they speak and behave imprudently
, damning the consequences. If one does it, he will simply be squashed; fired, censored,
canceled, deplatformed. If many do it, that's a different story. They can't fire us all. And if
that anger is great enough, they will fear us. They should. As Don Jr. recently tweeted , "70
million pissed off Republicans and not one city burned to the ground." But this may not last.
The election might just be the proverbial straw. The camel may be about to metamorphose into
the lion.
Already there are signs of uncharacteristic self-assertion on the part of angry Trump
voters. There have been large protests by Republicans in "swing states," including Michigan and Pennsylvania.
There has been violence. Continuing the lockdowns will exacerbate this. Everybody, not just
whites, has reached the breaking point with this COVID bullshit. Of course, now that Biden is
elected, it would not be surprising if COVID suddenly became a non-issue.
Here are some more predictions:
Trump has now moved over to Gab , a
free-speech platform that has embraced thought criminals of all kinds (so far). Trump's
supporters will follow him to Gab -- millions of them. They will read the other stuff and
become more red-pilled. You can almost predict this one with mathematical certainty.
Gun sales will increase as Trump voters scramble to arm themselves before Biden tries to
disarm them. Gun sales have increased enormously since the BLM riots began, so much so that the
stores cannot keep up with demand. Ammo sales have been so brisk it's now hard to find bullets
for those guns. (Yes, I do believe we
are headed for violent civil war .)
Conspiracy theories are going to be mainstreamed. This process was already underway, due
partly to the influence of "QAnon." I tried reading
the QAnon book , with the intention of writing something about it for this website. I
stopped because the thing was so stupid I couldn't get through it. If this stuff can be
influential among Trump voters, anything can. Alex Jones is all over Gab. The Trumpites who
follow their leader over to that platform will get a big dose of him -- and about 60% of what
he says is actually true. He was talking about Epstein's pedo island years ago.
One thing leads to another -- once, as I have said, a big lie is exposed, one begins to
question everything else. Who really runs the world? Who controls US policy in the Middle East?
What's Bohemian Grove all about? Exactly how long does it take to cremate a single body?
Inquiring minds want to know. Let a thousand conspiracy theories bloom! Every one of them helps
us, because every one of them undermines the system and the elites who run it.
White males are the only group Trump did not make gains with in 2020. Given his portrayal in
the media, the irony here is rich, as Jim Goad has noted. Had Trump
gotten more votes from white males, it looks like he would have outvoted even the dead and the
fake voters. As Gregory
Hood has pointed out, "the reason President Trump is in this position is because he
didn't do enough for white working-class voters ." He continues: "White working-class
voters are now the most important voting group in America. They will have decided two
presidential elections in a row. They will decide more."
The Republican establishment cannot be unaware of this. They've seen the same numbers Hood
has. If they did not realize it before, they realize it now. There will be absolutely no going
back to the Republican party of John McCain and Mitt Romney. Those names are hard to pronounce
now without gagging. That they were the Republican nominees in, respectively, 2008 and 2012 now
seems downright surreal. That is how much Trump has changed the party. To save that party,
Republicans will have to offer something to white voters. They will have to keep running the
Trump train, without Trump. (Though Trump is not going away; he will remain a huge part of
public life.)
Everyone thinks 2020 has been a terrible year. It is just the opposite. White nationalism
has taken a giant step forward.
To be an American nationalist is also to recognize that more recent, non-white arrivals
don't belong here at all; and that while our blacks have been here a long time and some of
them do sing, dance, and dribble well, they are mostly parasites who contribute almost
nothing to the society except grief.
The author makes a lot of cogent and well-reasoned points, but his delivery lacks nuance
and has a coarseness which suggests prejudice to the point of racism.
Not that I am accusing the author of being a racist at all – but in the field of
persuasion, a biased narrative produces polarisation, either confirming or disputing one's
preconceived beliefs.
I suggest adjusting the author's arguments to recognise the actual fundamental issue in
play, which is not skin colour or race or language, but CULTURE. Yes, no doubt, the
historical currents and ill-conceived government policies have herded different parcels of
humanity into differing contexts on the basis of their racial backgrounds, but while the
identifying characteristics (and idiotic government-enabled victim industries) may be
numerically associated with skin colour, the actual behavioural differentiations are
determined by the collective CULTURE adopted by each individual within their respective
communities.
Allow me a simplistic example here. By government policy, an Australian is recognised as
Koori (and entitled to all the government benefits, handouts, preferential treatment and
other assistance that Koori status attracts) if he/she can demonstrate that they have at
least 1/16 Koori blood. What a boon to the Australian "Aboriginal Industry", a
government-spawned victim industry par-excellence, whose client-base and professional
employment potential is thereby magically multiplied 10-fold compared a Koori threshold
limited to just full and half-bloods (do the math).
As would be expected, a great many people are all too eager to pile onto this "victim"
gravy train. Never mind that the bulk of them are white.
And the really warped thing about all of this, is that all those whiteys whose great great
grandmother or grandfather may have been a Koori, baited by the siren-song of government
entitlements and victim rights, all too often fall into the trap of government dependency and
economic despondency that afflicts so many of the victim industry's clientelle.
It's not language or race or skin colour, its CULTURE. Egged along by idiotic government
officials and vested interests.
Here in Australia, my view is that you're either Australian, or you're not. All other
considerations are secondary. That applies equally to foreign and domestic policy, and
equally to the native-born and immigrants. Until we come to understand and accept that
proposition, the NATION will be hobbled.
So too with the USA. Mind you, it appears to me that the USA's CULTURAL issues are rather
more entrenched and vulnerable to vested interests than in Australia (so far). If they can't
be resolved, then we may be looking at eventual disintegration into several nations,
irrespective of race.
Really, it's these exciting and dark times when real change happens. The Kali Yuga beckons
us all onwards! I look forward to that future thing which American Nationalism will give
birth to. I just hope it involves dragons, somehow, somewhere. Maybe on a flag.
Your premise of a "white homeland" in North America is problematic at best, since the
territory was already occupied by First Nations of indigenous peoples who clearly were the
first to make such a claim on these lands, which stood until the continent was stolen from
them by white people. A just reckoning of homelands begins with recognizing their prior
rights here first, and then assessing where in the world it is best to park our itinerant
white asses. But as you say, we've already forfeited our place in our actual white homelands
in Europe and elsewhere in the Old World. So maybe we can negotiate paying rent, on these
lands we occupy, to the poor survivors of the genocide we enacted to claim "our" home.
"Most of us thought that it would take such a collapse, but that this wouldn't happen in
our lifetimes. Well, my friends, now it has happened.'
Reminds me of Mr Twain & his comment that reports of his death have been greatly
exaggerated .
The author's race nationalism is sad, to say the least. As if "white" comes with a label.
(And never mind all the Legal/Property issues that would arise -- imagine sorting out an
Olympic sized pool of cooked spaghetti .)
"that we effectively secede from the USA and carve out our own white space (or spaces) within
North America. It is this latter option that now seems like it may be our only option, and
something we must work toward."
But having sorted out the labels "White", citizens can play " India 1947 -- the
Partion" : you know, that wonderful time when millions of Hindus moved south &
millions of Muslims moved north. Death toll somewhere between a couple of hundred thousand to
a couple of million. I wonder who will get the bulk of the Oligarchs ? Where will those
tribal Oligarchs feel more comfortable ?
Mexicans & Asians -- wonder whether they'll be welcome ? Turn away the Asians especially,
will go a long way to guaranteeing failure.
The saddest thing of all ? Assume all the race issues are settled -- & you still have 101
other political issues to deal with .Unless, of course, the author simply wants to transfer
the status quo to his new racial Eden .Wow, what a triumph that would be.
Of course Europeans and people outside of Europe of European descent are waking and
beginning to take our own side This is the inevitable reaction to our ( mostly ) hostile
elite, Politics as usual/ MSM etc are all in decline and no amount of censorship is changing
these trends. Matthew Goodwin and Roger Eatwell in National Populism The revolt against
liberal democracy are amongst many who see this happening. The trend is towards Nationalism
away from the Multiculti cult and its champions on tv etc. The silent majority in all White
nations are less silent with every passing year.
I've long considered myself a political exile. I left the US because I couldn't stand it
any more. The insanity of the laws, the always increasing police state was something I saw
but others apparently didn't.
If states start to secede and Texas is one of them, I'll move back. The Fed Gov is the
main problem and needs to totally disappear. When the USA goes the way of the USSR, then
you'll know there's a chance for freedom.
The history of race relations in the past 60 years or so has been based on your
assumption, that everyone is the same but environments create cultures that make them seem
different. It's a claim that's impossible to disprove, because you can define any traits as
cultural, and is therefore meaningless. Nevertheless, in practical real-life terms all you
have to do is look at how various groups behave in many different locations and even
different times, to see that something is at work besides culture.
And failing to acknowledge biodiversity leads to the absurd victimization industry that
has brought us to the brink of race war.
"warriors of the Powhatan "came unarmed into our houses with deer, turkeys, fish, fruits,
and other provisions to sell us". The Powhatan then grabbed any tools or weapons available
and killed all the English settlers they found, including men, women, and children of all
ages. Chief Opechancanough led the Powhatan Confederacy in a coordinated series of surprise
attacks; they killed a total of 347 people, a quarter of the population of the Virginia
colony."
Oh no those poor natives. Maybe they should have avoided a fight they couldn't win.
There's a reason we call them savages.
"The difference, however, is that that was all bullshit."
But, as the programmer Alberto Brandolini is reputed to have said: "The amount of energy
necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." This is the
unbearable asymmetry of bullshit .
There are so many massive lies out there that are still believed by many of the stupid
masses brainwashed by mass media, the universities, and a variety of other large
institutions.
You can't fix stupid.
So–my crystal ball is very foggy at this point.
(If you think about cultures in the history of the human race, all were based on a bunch
of lies. As Terence McKenna liked to say–nowhere is it written that we apes are
entitled to learn the truth about anything.)
@Etruscan Film Star in parallel with the whole racial profiling paradigm is the same idea
applied to religion, wherein George Dubya whipped up his "civilisational struggle" against
the Muslim world to facilitate American games of Empire. To the extent that any problem
actually exists, religion is a red herring. Here in Australia, Muslim people are amongst the
most genuine and charitable people that one can meet. In my experience, the only tiny
minority of Muslim people who have caused friction are invariably of Arab origin, and more
specifically from Saudi Arabia – an inherently tribal & chauvinistic culture (and a
key American ally in the Middle East – just sayin').
Race & religion are distractions. Compatible cultures can assimilate in a harmonious
society, while incompatible cultures cannot.
For the time being, as long as Jews play the gane of Whites vs Diversity, whites should
play a game of Jews vs Gentiles.
If Jews can lead a multicultural coalition against Whites, then Whites can lead a
multicultural coalition against Jews. This is their worst nightmare, and almost everything
they do is best understood as an attempt to prevent this.
This latter course would mean that we all go back to Europe, which the Europeans won't
allow, or that we effectively secede from the USA and carve out our own white space (or
spaces) within North America. It is this latter option that now seems like it may be our only
option, and something we must work toward.
Jez, they say I am a dreamer, and all I want is a free pony and some government
cheese.
I suspect that Australians are several decades behind Americans in discovering that your
perspective, which basically is what we called civic nationalism, is largely false and has
now largely failed. I don't have time to even sketch this, but you can look for critiques of
civic nationalism and for concepts like regression to the mean. I hope you can learn from our
experience.
@Ultrafart the Brave and snotty racist Europeans and Japanese kept the revolutionary
masses down. The opposite is the truth, it were the Europeans who were revolutionary folks
(French revolution/Enlightenment anyone) trying to spread modernism over racist, parochial,
reactionary, tribal darkie populations and the whole thing ended in tears and trumped up
charges against Whitey dreamt up by Jews, marxists and third World Nationalists/ elites. Same
with Japanese Empire which too was driven by the Pan Asian ideology. The Chinese too will be
rejected by the darkie masses in the future, they too will face trumped up charges for
"exploitation" and "oppression" in the future, it has already started right now.
I do not deny that there are differences between the races. However, breeding is not one
of them.
Ever since the end of slavery, American blacks have had moderate numbers of children,
essentially the same whites. Yes, really. Why do you think, after all these centuries,
pre-1965 American blacks are still hardly more than 10% of the population?
Actually the fraction of blacks in the United States is lower than it used to be –
the Grover-Cleveland cheap-labor immigration surge, that drove wages so low and profits so
high, was all from (at the time) white third-world Europe, and increased the white fraction
of the population. Because white europeans at the time bred more than black Americans!
So yes, during the 19th century and up through Mao, the Chinese bred like rabbits and
lived lives of total misery. After Mao, the Chinese fertility rate was allowed to moderate,
and now China is doing very well. Is there anything genetic in the Chinese people for either
high or or low fertility rates? No. This at least, is entirely cultural.
Are there genetic differences between the races? Yes. Is excessive breeding one of them?
No.
@Ultrafart the Brave in Western societies on average than MENA and South Asians, even the
African blacks, who have much more deeper cultures than New World blacks, they all integrate
fast into Western cultures but they tend to ebonyify everything. But they bring with them
some negative traits like tendency towards violence, crime, chip on the shoulder mentality,
melanin power mentality, seeing racism everywhere etc So culturally they integrate faster but
the skin colour difference creates resentments and temperament differences still exist. On
the positive side blacks are not clannish as the darker Eurasian semi Caucasoids and have an
individualistic tendency which does gel well with individualistic Northern Euros.
I was away from Polaris Parkway, just North of Westerville and Worthington, Ohio, for a
couple of months and things have deteriorated quickly.
This also happened to Epstein Best Bud, Les Wexner's pet project Easton Town Center, close to
New Albany Wexner's British Village Fantasyland.
The common factor in deterioration is wait for it
Blacks and Browns, managed by jews.
Philadelphia Block Busting, 60 years later, same demographic players.
@sb understand that the Australian aboriginals were not a uniform race across the
Australian continent. The Tasmanian Aboriginals were quite different to their continental
counterparts, but even the mainlanders were not racially homogenous. The racial makeup of the
native peoples of Papua & New Guinea are completely different again.
A broad analogy can be drawn with the various black races occupying the African continent
– their skin colour doesn't uniquely define their respective races. For an extreme
example, compare the Congo Pygmies of central Africa with the Rwandan Tutsis.
I do take your point, however – rather than qualify the Kooris as Australian for a
potentially global audience, perhaps it is simpler to just refer generically to native
Australians..
One might think so, but apparently not. Instead, in so many ways the Australian culture
seems to be marching in suicidal lockstep with the USA, like the mythical lemmings toward the
proverbial cliff.
An appalling example of this is the insidious slide of the Australian medical system over
the last few decades from a universally free model to a for-profit one infested with middle
men and insurance rackets, presumably on a trajectory towards a full-blown American-style
Big-Pharma business model with the poor folk thrown under the bus.
@Malla rt of thinking aligns somewhat with reports of homecoming head-chopping ISIS
psychos being sent to reeducation camps in Xinjiang, China. The local indigenous population
apparently is doing just fine, but returning extremists trained for genocidal wars in the
Middle East no longer fit in.
Here's a true story which helps to illustrate that the principle of cultural harmony
transcends race, and even species. I was raised on a farm, and on this farm were herds of
sheep and also some turkeys. One particular sheep somehow got it into her head that she was a
turkey. She would follow the turkey flock around all day, and at night, she would roost in a
tree with the turkeys. The turkeys didn't seem to mind, and the sheep seemed quite happy.
Compatible cultures.
The stolen election is like Jewish control of the media. EVERYBODY, even Biden voters know
this SELECTION/ELECTION WAS STOLEN, but like Jewish control of the media, we are demanded to
pretend it doesn't exist or never happened.
No Trump fan here, but I voted for the Orange Man because of the alternative. I still have
hope that Team Trump can turn this around. All the Jew/Israel butt kissing aside and the
broken promises and holding meetings with (c)rappers, Trump did expose the "normies" to the
FAKE MEDIA. Hell, that is more than any other modern day POTUS has done for Whites. Can
someone tell me when was the last time Whites had a true representative in the White House
that actually looked out for White Americans and was concerned about White civil rights? I am
pushing 60 and we haven't had one in my lifetime for sure.
So that, as a White Nationalist, I am a German nationalist, an English nationalist, a
Scottish nationalist, a French nationalist, etc.
I think if we take it as far as Hitler, we are also Chinese nationalists, and Japanese
nationalists etc – those nations can develop in their spheres – and so much the
better for them. But they may not force themselves on us (or others).
This whole article is based on the Susan Sarandon premise in 2016 when Bernie lost –
that a Trump win would inspire the base to elect a progressive, caring left wing politician.
This didn't turn out – the system got rigged for about as establishment a criminal as
could have been chosen.
Article 10 is not easy to execute. The right may have honour and guns, but the left is
TDSed, and rabies is one strong steroid to help with a fight!
In addition there is no real leader – one who could strategise a secession
effectively. Trump certainly couldn't. He'd be great as the PR guy, but not as the leader.
Until one is born, America is stuck within the belly of the US beast.
Author Costello said:
"Had Trump gotten more votes from white males, it looks like he would have outvoted even the
dead and the fake voters."
Nope.
Costello misses the point that the curious count stoppage was a pause to enable the left
to manufacture the votes that they then anticipated needing in lieu of the largely pro-Trump
turnout numbrs. And, any unanticipated pro-Trump surge could have easily been overcome by
having a reserve at the ready.
IOW:
Regardless of who had voted for Trump, they simply would have been overcome by the left
creating more fake votes for Biden.
I would add materialist values and urbanization to the blend. All my ancestry emanated
from Scandinavia. After checking out several major cities during the years of my young
manhood, I returned to a rural, homesteading life.
Working with my hands and body is important to my well-being. Seasonally, living on the
northwestern fringe of the Northwoods, winters are long and arduous -- a good time for
artistic and intellectual pursuits. The soul has its needs, as Thomas Moore pointed out in
his book "Growth of the Soul". My needs center on living close to the mother of us all.
Northeast Asians and Northwest Europeans share much in this perspective.
Not too many answers to why and to what purpose but still a brilliant article.
Generals love the war, soldiers not so much.
There is lingering question in my mind! The question is: Who loves more war, Israel , or
seventeen intelligence agencies with General staff.
But for the time being I am very much against any radical solution.
I am with Trump's "Stand down and stand by".
I think Biden also does deserve a chance to come up with solutions.
But if Biden starts a new war than everything will be justified and Final solution will
become inevitable.
@TG k up a feast. The younger children enjoy their own fun and games. The older ones help
their samesex parents. During the evening after supper, the bottles get passed around and
sometimes there is music and perhaps dancing.
The bulk of the Amish -- and the Mennonites -- emerged from an Anabaptist culture in
Switzerland and parts of Germany and during the late 17th Century many of them relocated to
Lanacaster County Pennsylvania, from which they have now colonized westwards wherever there
is the possibility of true country living. Not many of them migrate past the 90th Meridian,
where poor soil and semi-arid conditions are poorly conducive to agriculture and cozy country
living.
@Ultrafart the Brave s have manipulated much in America in the last 50 years and that is
the bigger reason for what are marketed as 'cultural clashes'. Most of them are bogus and
engineered.
Race & religion are distractions. Compatible cultures can assimilate in a harmonious
society, while incompatible cultures cannot.
Agree, again, I'd use the term: shared or accepted values.
(Fwiw, I'm willing to go the step further and view the author as a likely racist and
supremacist. Most people like that have lived sheltered lives and had little exposure to a
variety of peoples. Many of their assertions are simply empty and unaware of ahem the real
world.)
If Brexit ranks NINE on the Collective Self-Harm for No Good Reason scale, proposing a
civil war in the 21st century to create a "whites only" state in North America is so nutty it
breaks the dial.
But We'll give you MT, ND, SD, WY, IA, NB, KS, and Maybe OK. That way you can all go back
to growing crops and digging oil (ND) for your subsistence. Every place else is getting too
mixed for you.
Maybe if you're nice the Hawaiians will let you vacation on their islands occasionally to
get a break from long cold winters.
Though a lame and uninsightful article on the whole, the strategy of and desire for
secession is the healthiest conclusion that the author could have been reached. I would just
hope that when whites within the ethnostate inevitably conflict with the ethnogovernment that
he would also want for them to secede.
What a simple morality play for the banking elites (who own both parties through
"lobbying, i.e. bribery" sanctioned by the highest courts) to divide and conquer the
taxcattle.
You are arguing over who you pay Tribute to. This is a golden opportunity for mass civil
disobedience to overwhelm and bury the decrepit, imperial corporatist oligarchy.
The stone-age aboriginals who previously inhabited what is now America failed to defend
their lands from invasion. Sadly, we've learned nothing from their mistakes.
Ronnie Unz needs to weigh in here Give the little cretin credit for posting this of
course.
Ronnie you are about to get your brown invasion that you so crave good and hard. Of all
the things that the globalist elites want in electing this moron demented POS called Biden is
an open border
Here it comes Ronnie Won't you and your bro Cholo loving Reed be soooo very happy
Amnesty is going to be served up as one of the first acts of Shithead Biden's
administration
Rejoice Ronnie . More poverty crossing the border to cut your grass.. And a bigger mass of
people for the welfare state
Of course you think that maids and dry wall hangers are natural conservatives I beg to
differ Where i live in Virginia they are natural clients of our welfare offices. We are
ground zero for the Welfare Dreamers who come from Central America.
I don't have to gaze into my navel and dream up some statistics about this you insipid
moron I can walk down the street to the Socialist Service office and see it for my own
eyes.
Yes Ronnie White Nationalist failed thanks to shitheads like you . Now asshole enjoy
paying California taxes to support open door poverty
Virginia is we are now on par to have California style taxes to support the brown
wave.
Your Buddy Reed had a good plan for escaping that I believe he used to be a Virginian he
moved to where the cholos are leaving!
As to this article right!! Cucked whites are doing shit. They'll be called racists and
shrivel up like a daisy in a wind storm.
@Priss Factor he Jewish agenda. Why don't we have a Herve Ryssen here in the US? Why
don't we have an Alain Soral, publishing prolifically and SELLING books to the deplorable
French yellow vests? Why don't we have a comedian like Dieudonne, poking fun at the organized
community and its endless wailing about its victimhood? We need more strong voices, willing
to point out the fact that there is NO SUCH THING as "Judeo-Christian values"; the very idea
grew out of a poison, Scofield Reference Bible influenced swamp, a hideous swamp monster
feeding on bleating Christian Zionist sheep, baa baa baaing as their wealth and futures are
extracted by the oligarch Jews.
It seems, based on much video, as well as the geographic centers of this fraud, that
negroes played a disproportionate role in the illegal election activities. Now that does seem
counter intuitive, as negroes are overwhelming honest, law abiding citizens.
I can only imagine that it was some small group of Jews that bribed our colored brethren
to engage in this thoroughly out of character misbehavior that may well lead to violent,
bloody national upheaval.
If only we had employed a larger share of our negro population in the various lucrative
advertisement opportunities, thereby sparing them from a life of soul crushing poverty. We
might have saved the nation, had we been kinder to our minority Black population.
"A White Nationalist is someone who believes that white peoples have a right to their
own homelands." – White Americans forfeited this right the moment they began
bringing African slaves here. Advocacy for white nationalism in America is advocacy for
secession or genocide. If you have no stomach for advocating genocide of non-whites in
America you must advocate for carving out white homeland for white nationalists. This
homeland no long will represent America or be America, so you no longer will be American
white nationalist but white 'bantustan' nationalist. If you lucky the rest of America will
let you have casinos in your bantustan.
The karma of the U.S was always screwed from the day the vile white Euro invaders fucked
with the natives and if there should be statues they should be of the likes of Geronimo and
not white imperial scum.
May the spirits of all the slaughtered native North American Indians be smiling from ear
to ear at the potentially very dangerous division in the middle country of North America.
A very good article that raises a lot of valid points. White Supremacy is the ONLY way,
that's what (((they))) call us, so ride with it – wear their labels with pride. Onwards
and upwards!
"The goal of abolishing the white race is, on its face, so desirable that some may find it
hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed WHITE
SUPREMACISTS .Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and
the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as the white race is
destroyed."
– Noel Ignatiev, Jewish Harvard professor and co-founder of 'Race Traitor'
magazine.
What makes you think White Americans brought blacks to America? America didn't even exist
when black slavery commenced and the bulk of black slaves went to the Spanish colonies, not
the American colonies.
A just reckoning of homelands begins with recognizing their prior rights here first,
A just reckoning also requires a statute of limitations on questions priority and a
recognition of who actually built the country.
Besides, the 'native' tribes were already killing and displacing each other. They were
mutually hostile, not united. Why should the addition of one more tribe to that warring mix
– albeit a tribe whiter and more successful than the rest – make any difference?
Ironically, it takes a 'racist' to claim that it does.
Agree, although Jews have a few advantages that make them much better at it, namely a
couple thousand years experience operating as tiny minorities in others lands and a shameless
hyperethnocentric instinct evidently lacking in white gentiles.
I looked at gab but it didn't seem very user friendly, problem is also everybody needs to
cease using twitter and shift to gab at the same time, critical mass.
And where, amongst these face diapered morons and Covid fearing degenerates, will you find
freedom?
America's problems are far greater than issues of Race, Politics, or Culture. At the core,
the issue is complete Spiritual Collapse, manifested in craven cowardice, cringingly
lickspittle obedience, mindless group think, and resolute belief in imaginary events.
This isn't going to end well for anyone. The spiritual death of America is as permanent as
it is absolute.
This latter course would mean that we all go back to Europe, which the Europeans won't
allow .
You haven't been paying attention, sonny. The Europeans are busy trying to catch up with
America's comparitive advantage by importing masses of similar types.
Has anybody else besides myself noticed how fast Jared Taylor and his #1 prize writer,
Gregory Hood – have cucked and caved in and conceded that the DemonRats won the 2020
Presidential election?
And, how each of these guys have now gone into full concession mode and are trying to
persuade and influence their followers to join them in their cuckery and effeminate
willingness to become submissive?
Also, I was listening to a recent Red Ice podcast where they had a slew of allegedly
pro-white community spokesmen and women on to discuss the fraudulent and clearly obvious
attempts by the Demonic leftists to steal the election and they were pushing a meme that I
found more than a little bit disturbing.
It went something like this: Racially healthy Whites need to respond to this travesty by
'opting out' of the 'system'. This means that Whites need to stop participating; i.e., stop
voting completely.
Alex Linder once said, when discussing the suicidal mindset of Whites who were infected
with Christianity – and who we all have repeatedly heard on various talk radio call-in
shows come on the
radio – after another leftist anti-white agenda victory and say: "Well, I will just
continue to pray and leave things up to God" – Linder dubbed that kind of attitude by
Whites as nothing more than pathetic excuse for them to continue to 'do nothing' to help
themselves or their people. I agree.
This meme that 'Whites need to stop voting' is exactly the same kind of attitude. I am
willing to concede the point that voting is senseless as long as the system continues to
allow fraudulent and illegal chicanery to thrive and go unpunished. But, anyone who actively
promotes the idea that Whites should just completely opt out is pushing advice that is
exactly what our mortal enemies want most. It is a complete surrender to being ruled over by
non-whites and jews who hate our guts and who do not want to encounter any opposition to
their agenda to genocide our race of people.
Yes, the election WAS stolen, the democrats having admitted it themselves after four years
of trying to get rid of president Trump, as they said, "BY ANY MEANS POSSIBLE"!! So rational
people are now to believe that they have suddenly become honest players in the 2020 election?
As the saying goes, GOOD LUCK WITH THAT THOUGHT /..Dr. Charles Fhandrich.
@Stonewall Jackson sympathizing with some of your sentiments, Stonewall, but your
mean-spirited discourse (directed towards our host, no less) is a textbook example of why
Comments Sections (and some commentators) get edited–and even banned. Why take this
route? It seems self-defeating.
Your disrespectful attitude undermines your appeal. It also diminishes this site.
Why not aim higher? Why not civility?
Ron Unz might be wrong here and there. But he is not a "moron". Making such claims makes
you look like one.
Ron Unz has given the world a forum where countless and controversial and conflicting
points of view are given oxygen and light. This is invaluable and rare.
This is probably the most profound and auspicious moment in modern American history. I
would like to see Trump and the Republican party seize this moment by creating a parallel
government. Imagine 71 million Americans standing solid and publicly announcing a resounding
"Fuck you!" to the Jewish commies and all their colored cohorts.
'Why should the addition of one more tribe to that warring mix make a difference?'
Because it was their homeland, unlike the Euro invaders of central North America and just
try asking an elderly Palestinian how that feels.
And the different tribes may have been at war occasionally but this can hardly be compared
to the mass slaughter of the Native North American Indians and their Bison(to try and starve
them).
@Ultrafart the Brave Most importantly, the lies attributing black dysfunction to white
racism must stop immediately, and the government has to stop shoving diversity down our
throats continuously.
Allow freedom of association, enforce the laws, stop making excuses for black dysfunction,
and limit if not eliminate further immigration into the West from the Third World.
Perhaps then there can be some hope for us living together with a modicum of peace and
prosperity.
But I agree with you that nothing is accomplished by referring to an entire group of
people in completely disparaging terms.
That being said, black dysfunction has been and continues to be a serious problem that
will not be resolved by blaming it on white racism.
@Frankie P , who are both honored as Prophets in Islam, but instead, Jews spit on hearing
their names and do the same while passing a Christian of any kind or a Christian Church in
Israel. They have no respect for Christians or any other religion.
It is time the Jewish lobbies and the American Government leaders as well as the evangelical
Christian leaders who mislead the poor American young into joining the military and believing
that they are doing something for God and Christianity by fighting Israel's wars were named,
shamed and arrested and tried for treason.
In a perverse sort of way, israel's favorite "war song" is "Onward Christian Soldiers"
There I've said it
Will the redpilled understand that America has done this to many other countries, with
many more dead, or will their new consciousness be limited to this particular event? Because
the redpilled ones were always enthusiastic about new military adventures.
If the warriors came unarmed, but wound up killing people instead, I'd wonder what took
place in the interval. Something tells me we're only hearing one side and only a small part
of the story.
As for avoiding a fight they couldn't win, what advantage would they have obtained if they
just bent over and took it in the cheeks without a fight?
Maybe the reason "we" call them savages is called projection.
BTW, here's an example of what failing to fight will get ya,
An elephant that had some tests performed on it was going to be culled. However, in the
end, they decided to release it back into the wild (within the reserve).
This elephant took it into it's head that it was an African buffalo!
It hung out with the buffalo herd, and started to emulate the buffaloes behavior.
Initially, of course, the buffaloes were a tad leery of their new, very large friend –
but eventually got used to him.
And the elephant provided plenty of muscle when it came to lions stalking the herd.
It seems like you got the Pocahontas version of history.
All I can say is that if some guys on horses abducted my daughter and then slowly tortured
and scalpted her to death, you can be sure I wouldn't hesitate to genocide each and every one
of those savages down to the last one. But let's not have facts interrupt your narcissistic
moral masturbating. Just don't come here, coz in the end we'll end up laughing at you.
@Majority of One watermelon, they pass around the gin and juice and sit around smoking
the chronic and endo. Guns and ammunition are then passed around and they all discuss that
nights or the next days activities.
The bulk of the Negroes emerged from the African bush, sold by their own and competing
tribes and have colonized all 52 states wherever there is the possibility of free living and
handouts. Not many of them migrate to rural areas where country living and hard work would be
considered racist and discriminatory.
We have to thank our black Bros and Sistas. Without their motto "there can be no
construction without destruction" the USA would never be what it is today.
Ahhh This white man has put in a convincing case for himself and people like him and he
has my total support. He and his people can have Wyoming and half of South Dakota, only half.
Want some cows and mules? Take them. Take some white women also if they agree to go. And you
must take Trump with you, he's white like you. Good luck.
White liberals cry crocodile tears when the jewsmedia reminds them how White settlers
stole land formerly inhabited by American Indians. But, the fact is, every people alive in
the world today stole the land they now live on from a weaker people. It's the history of
mankind. Further, every Indian tribe in America at the time of Columbus had stolen their land
from another tribe, and they continued warring and land stealing until the White man put a
stop to it.
This obsession with restitution and atonement, is replacing religion. Only a race too long
comfortable would consider giving away to the defeated all they have accomplished and hard
fought for.
Churchills jewish henchman, fake aristocrat and architect of the Dresden and associated
slaughters frederick linderman mused that the defining event of the 20th century would be
'the abdication of the white man'.
The seeds of annihilation were sown in the late 19th century, now comes the reaping, aided
ably by the mendacity, sloth and cowardice of our own peoples and leaders.
President Kushner or President Emhoff that is the question. Same old – Jewish
"White" Supremacy. The "white" supremacy game of our "free" Zion press forgets to say which
"whites" are supreme. Our "free" Zion press is right that there is a "white" group that is
supreme but do not go into details which one. Unz site is one of the few sites that notices
this "white" group that is supreme in the US and in the entire west.
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff, will leave his job as a
partner with a high-profile law firm to focus on his role in the new Biden
administration.
A campaign spokeswoman said Tuesday that Emhoff will sever ties with DLA Piper by
Inauguration Day. Emhoff took a leave of absence from the firm in August, when Harris was
named Joe Biden's running mate. Biden and Harris will be inaugurated Jan. 20.
Emhoff is working with the transition team to determine the issues he will take on as
the vice presidential spouse. He is the first man to hold that role, as Harris is the
nation's first female vice president.
thanks mr Costelo for showing your thought crystal clear.
I a south american, am not entirely a contradictor to your views. And even share a few of
them.
If you re a white US nationalist I am a Brazilian, no matter-what-color, nationalist.
A nationalist must necessarily abide by the Westphalia Peace and be a faithful son of the
1815 Wien Conference.
The first corolarium of a nationalist like you is , of course, abhorr and abolish globalism.
This concedes a few exceptions (such as worlwide communications) since they are already in
place and cannot be sensibly reverted.
NOTE 1:I do want to wipe out globalism. (though not for every small nation nation of the
world, which would turn not applicable and counterproductive) away from my country for the
next decades at least.
The second corolarium is that any self conscious country should cling and fiercely defend a
strong list of protectionist laws. And entirely renegotiate the rusty, hegemonic leaning WTO
rules. Not to quit it but to found a new WTO. This protection is what the US did all the the
19th century long, from top to bottom.
The third one that springs out as a consequence is that the STATE presence and adhesion to
state owned companies in key sectors is vital to any nationalism.
Now the big criterium to enlight and tell things apart is: the less develoloped a country is
the more
of state ownership and reliance it will requires.
So until my home country does reach a 40.000 dollar/year PER CAPITA income, with an
acceptable
income distribution, I will be a feroucious nationalist just like Costello.
It is taken for granted that small places like Singagore, Uruguay, Andorra, Bosnia or
seychelles can AT WILL make an option to globalize, to intenationalize, to sell themselves
out to neighbor or to the best bidder.
No half words, no subtle or figurative language. And nobody must keep a secret as to what to
do when a big , rich, established country the destroy this legitimate thir party Nationalism,
annex or dominate the so described national entity.
Revolution, no less.
@Random Anonymous ti" future, they needed to introduce the intermediate step of civic
nationalism, whereby anyone could be an American as long as they were willing to assimilate
into the dominant culture. Hence, Israel Zangwill's The Melting-Pot .
Thus, civic-nationalism represented the proverbial camel poking its nose through the tent
before entering it completely. Once Westerners became acclimated to having non-Westerners
living among themselves, the assimilationist approach slowly began to be transformed into the
multicultural framework, one in which the overarching objective of dismantling "white
supremacy" was slowly unfurled. This is where we find ourselves today.
Like sensible people, I think they understand that America is never going to be another
Orania. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orania,_Northern_Cape
It's possible to get a deeper appreciation of the roots of America's social crisis America by
reading Thomas Sowell who has uniquely, I think, shown that patronizing guilt-ridden whites
(those that were) over the decades bear a particular responsibility.
Well, if you can't see racism in this guy words I'm convincente that you're already a
totally blind racist.
There is NO white land in this continent, son. If you are that German, english, Nordic
white nationalist then you can surely Go back there to European origins and claim your
ancestors' lands. But one thing you can never claim is the right over stolen territory,
neither to define how long one have to occupy robbed land until be able to recognize others
as a "native white"
or INVADERS.
EVERY SANE HUMAN KNOWS WHAT IS BEHIND THIS FACADE OF ARGUMENT.
NO WAY ANY REAL NATIVE CAN CLAIM TO BE WHITE, LET ALONE CALL AFRICAN DESCENDENTS ("OUR
BLACKS" ) PARASITES AND THIA SPEAKS VOLUMES ABOUT THE SICK PREMISES THIS COLONIALIST
SUPREMACIST IS DEFECATING FROM HIS MOUTH.
Friday rush hour. Euston station [in London]. Who's here? Who isn't. A kaleidoscope of
skin colours. The world in one terminus. Barbara Roche can see it over the rim of her cup of
Americano coffee. "I love the diversity of London," she tells me. "I just feel
comfortable."
White Americans brought them here? All White Americans? Was a black or two parceled out to
each White American? Blacks were brought here before America was a nation. And not by White
Americans.
A huge number of White Americans came to America after White Americans abolished slavery.
Most black slaves weren't even brought to White America but spanish america. White Americans
must pay as a group right?
Congrats on being the lowest IQ writer to ever be published on this site. Glad to see Ron
Unz is doing his part to increase representation of the imbecile community.
"Nation" is a white concept. De-colonialize your brain, bigot! To the redskins, land
belonged to those who could take it, and Europeans honored that tradition in grand style.
Do you really believe the BS you just spewed? "So, things began to slide when welfare became
generous and English wasn't required, etc. All of that has been to the detriment of the black
population and the cause of many problems in that population." Just another excuse for blacks.
Blacks are parasitic criminals, they are going to complain welfare or not. Cut off welfare to
blacks then, they never deserved it anyway. The most undeserved race in the world.
This obsession with Tucker Carlson is as ridiculous as the obsession with Jordan Peterson.
Neither give two shits about anything white nationalist. Tucker was born into this life with a
jewish silver spoon in his mouth. The guy is worth $20+ million. The fact he hasnt left Foxnews
immediately after the networks recent debacle with election reporting shows where his loyalty
lies, like most jews (even though he's adopted) its with $$$$
Further, every Indian tribe in America at the time of Columbus had stolen their land from
another tribe, and they continued warring and land stealing until the White man put a stop to
it.
Of course they put a stop to it. Because they wanted a monopoly on all that. Same reason the
White Euro Christians put a stop to Germany's "lebensraum" ideas. The examples are nearly
endless.
We hyoominz are wunnerful, no? And religions and politicians are here to solve it all.
Uh -huh!
Just came across this interesting video of Enoch Powell debating Jonathan Miller on issues
around UK immigration. They both appeared on the Dick Cavett Show, which aired back in 1971
Not sure if the honourable Enoch Powell had known this trivia about Jonathan, but if he had
he should've put the following query to him:
"You seem to be an ardent proponent of promoting mass immigration into Britain. Are you just
as ardent a proponent of promoting mass immigration into Eretz Israel?"
If Jonathan had been injected with a truth serum, he would have likely responded:
"Don't be silly. Why would HaShem's chosen people wish to mix with the goyim of the world?
Sheesh, what a schmuck!"
While it is true that people of the same culture, race and religion live in more harmony in
their marriages, and probably in their society, there is no way to achieve that objective in
today's world of mass communication and mass transportation. Impossible. To even think about
something like that is a recipe for nothing better than frustration and despair. The Church
recommended that people of the different cultures and races and religions should not marry
because of the risk that it would interfere with the harmony in their marriage as they face
life's other trials. It's solution when the Christians came to the Americas was for them to
convert the nations and it's objective was to promote better like-mindedness and better harmony
that could sustain them as they lived together in the Americas.
This is what the globalists believe they can achieve without Christianity. Well, they can't,
because without Christianity, there is only self-interest, the opposite of Christianity, and
that is what they are affirmatively teaching at the moment, for self-interest is what they need
to promote disunity, for that provides the means for better control of society.
In my opinion, you had better find another way. Maybe you would be better off correcting the
vast majority of hispanics for believing they are something other than Caucasian.
Indians slaughtered each other on the regular, they enslaved each other on the regular, they
were not a peaceful people and quite savage. Indian tribes would often join up with the White
man to fight other Indian tribes.
Hey, are you a member of the same tribe that Lizzy Warren is from or are you a member of the
(((tribe.))) Come on, now, you really don't give two shits about Native Americans, you just
hate Whitey, don't you? Anyone can search my rather lengthy comment history and they will find
they I have a few posts claiming the American Indian is the ONLY nonwhite people who Whitey
owes a damn thing to, not a popular opinion, but it is mine and I will own it.
I have an excellent idea! Go to the south and find some white man, preferably someone who
hunts, and tell him he has to move because he's on "stolen land."
@Tucker aged what got us here in the first place? So certainly, completely disengaging is
what will further accelerate our demise. You have to wonder, maybe these organizations are part
of the gay op to further disenfranchise whites even faster?
This display of white weakness needs to end. If you believe in your right to exist and for
the sake of your children, never let them gain any more power, ever. If that means voting for
someone that also supports Israel, then so what? If you as a WN, ever think there have been
more 'pure and honest' politicians in the past, or are waiting for your perfect WN savior to
support in the future, then you are just stupid, sorry.
@christine drafting place – but not exclusive. I spent over 3 decades with Athabaskan
and eskimos – Inuit, Yupik, and a few Aleuts – since the Aleuts were the last
genocided tribe – during WW II when they moved all of them to the mainland – in
order own all their land – after the War. In the end, this is all planned by the Owners
– Illuminati- Deep State – Zionists etc. It doesn't matter if they genocide the
Nates – the whites, blacks, Browns – until all the tribes unite and take out the
Cancer – the Plan will continue. PS the Russians , when they owned Alaska – never
genocided the Native population – no matter what the media or stupid SE Nates –
say. I homesteaded in Alaska .
According to Wikipedia, Newsmax is co-owned by Christopher Ruddy and Richard Mellon
Scaife(heir to the Mellon fortune in Pittsburg). Ruddy is the son of a police officer in NYC
and a confidant of Trump. Per Wiki he graduated from Hebrew University of Jerusalem for
undergrad, but his first name suggests he's not Jewish. Is he? He describes himself as a
"libertarian conservative" and Reaganite.
October 28, 2020 Report: Biden Would Kill Upwards Of 159K Jobs In Mich.
According to a recent study, Michigan supports around 159,000 jobs in the oil and gas
industry, all of which would be eliminated under Biden's plan to achieve zero emissions by
2035.
The "redpilled" fully understand that America's foreign wars are a load of BS that profit
the military industrial complex and certain lobbying groups – but not the USA itself.
To you, a Jew is an American nationalist because he is not a recent arrival, unlike, say,
Ilhan Omar. I got your number you're not a nationalist but a paid up harlot masquerading,
sadly, as a White nationalist.
"Like what North America, Australia, Argentina predominantly was before mass non -White
migration"
Argentina? No mass non-White migration here, to speak of. This country since the white
arrival has always been a mestizo society.The same is true of much of Central and more
so South America. During this century in Argentina,there has been a substantial migration of
Bolovins, Peruvians and Paraguyans thanks to the Kirchners (our Clintons) " Patria
Grande " program that allowed them in, but it represents nothing on the scale of what has
been done elsewhere to the north. Here the issue is less a color issue than a class issue.
But We'll give you MT, ND, SD, WY, IA, NB, KS, and Maybe OK.
You'll need to get Canada's permission before you give away New Brunswick.
I imagine the "honesty belt" would quickly become a desirable place to live compared to
everywhere else, and the good solid folks in Honestan would again allow their resident shlomos
to open the floodgates.
In order to be taken seriously you need some kind of united front. Take a look at even small
minority groups such as the LGBTQ community, who maybe accounts for 3% of the US population,
but has grown into a unified political force.
There also needs to be a consequence if your group is wronged. We have daily mainstream
television shows that do nothing but make fun of White people and their traditions. The Muslims
behead anyone who dares draw a stick figure of Muhammad, let alone entire programming dedicated
to the denigration of their culture.
In order to defeat a bully, you need to punch them in the mouth. Right now many people are
hopefully waking up to the fact that there is indeed a bully, then identifying exactly who that
is, and finally taking some sort of action against the bully.
@Priss Factor anded by their "G_d" to Rule the World, tikkun olam , " (b)light
unto the nations " and 20 other descriptors for the megalomaniac tyrant known as the Jew,
who lusts to control blacks, whites and everyone else in slavery to itself.
I do agree with the author that we White Nationalists need to lose our fear of defending our
racial identity, but da' blacks ain't da' problem. The Jewish race / ideology that lusts to
destroy us ALL – IS the problem.
Talking about black / white racial tensions as if they were the source of our problems is
like worrying about dandruff on a cancer patient. So PLEASE, let's get to the point, shall
we?
Increased white nationalism leads to increased anti-white-nationalism. Genociding indigenes
makes white supremacists look evil. Trumpism leads to BLMism and Antifa. White wars of
aggression lead to brown refugees going to Europe. God will turn Europe and North America
black, red and yellow if He wants to, and He can do it by taking advantage of white people's
pride and letting them do stupid "white supremacist" things that make them look bad.
The pilpul by Miller is truly astonishing, comparing old British people to
immigrants!
People like Miller serve the purpose of trying to rationalise the decisions of the other
members of his Tribe, usually by gaslighting people into thinking they are crazy and nothing
out of the normal is happening. Hence you see these crazy metaphors and analogies drawn by the
likes of Miller in that clip.
"As many on our side have said, we will make no real and substantial progress until we are
willing to openly stand up for ourselves -- in person, in broad daylight, and without sock
puppets and noms de plume like "Jef Costello." Is that day imminent? I believe that it is."
In that case, let's have your real name practice what you preach!
"the bulk of black slaves went to the Spanish colonies, not the American colonies"
Could you please cite supporting evidence for this assertion? I think (but am unsure) it is
incorrect. One thingof which I am certain, however,is that the Spaniards abolished slavery far
earlier than the white Americans. Another is that Spaniards are also "white".
White males are the only group Trump did not make gains with in 2020.
Is that true? How does anybody know that? Exit polls?
After all these wildly inaccurate polls for four years, are we suddenly to believe polls
now?
Furthermore, consider this: The one group you can steal votes from if you're the Democrats
are the white males. This is where you would do it. You can't steal any from the column of
black voters -- since they vote 90% for you already there simply aren't enough to steal. You
steal them from the white males, it's a beautiful double-whammy. One, you get your stolen
victory; two, you demoralize the strongest group arrayed against you.
"In my experience, the only tiny minority of Muslim people who have caused friction are
invariably of Arab origin, and more specifically from Saudi Arabia – an inherently tribal
& chauvinistic culture (and a key American ally in the Middle East – just
sayin')."
Unfortunately, Arabs, in particular Saudis, are a horrible disease that needs to be removed
by all means, including thermo nuclear radiation therapy!
What I don't get, from the likes of sweethearts like Pedro
how does the fact that the Sioux were riding their horses across Colorado before we got
here, make it mean that Mexican half-Aztec / half Spaniards have a right to come and steal it
from *us* ?
If we stole it from the Sioux as he says, the presence of his lardbutt here means he is
accepting stolen goods, which means his sin is as big as -- or bigger than -- ours.
I keep telling blacks about jews and slavery in JUSA – they pretend they don't believe
what I am saying even though I provide evidence (from this website).
I guess they are more opportunistic than I thought and less brave, hoping their jewish masters
will somehow help them get more money from white people, so they don't want to bite the hand
they expect will feed them
To whom the land belongs?
At one time in world history all land did belong to dinosaurs.
So how to do justice about ownership of the land?
Human beings should kill each other until no human being left, and than the land will belong to
its rightful owners again, the animals.
Native Americans were the ones who had this right idea.
They were killing each other and eating each other.
..
Did somebody ask Dahmer if human flesh taste better than chicken?
Someone for the love of God please start an American Nationalist conference and invite all
people who have the tiniest shred of dignity left in this chemical plagued population.
The goal of the conference: to discuss starting a political party that will be a valid third
party option. Agendas to be fleshed out: donor registration, billboard campaigns, multi-state
speeches targeting smaller towns that have been boarded up, setting up a volunteer network of
security operatives to forcibly secure election integrity, etc.
This stuff isn't rocket science and I don't understand why so many people who have money and
claim to be for WHITE NATIONALISM have not pushed their people in this direction. BUT IF YOU
DONT HAVE MONEY and are interested in this let me share with you a secret to start it. Get 10
under-writers who will lend $5,000 for a total of $50k. $50,000 should be enough to get the
ball rolling. I would be willing to help $. If you sell enough tickets you can pay the lenders
back. Secure a venue and promote tickets to the conference across multiple platforms.
Just an idea for saving our people in this midnight hour.
"I suggest adjusting the author's arguments to recognise the actual fundamental issue in
play, which is not skin colour or race or language, but CULTURE"
I call BS. You are one of those people who believe that NURTURE is everything and NATURE
accounts for nothing. A very foolish mindset. A deluded mindset. Do some research and come back
after you have learned something from the real world and not from your Marxist professors.
It's not Jews (technically JewISH). It is the multitudes of all races around the world, who
have ignored the word of God, and chosen the JewISH (and Catholic, at the top) agenda, as the
preferred way of life.
This frank article confirms pretty much what I posted in DaLimbraw Library over a year ago
– https://crushlimbraw.blogspot.com/2019/08/white-supremacy-is-it-time-to-face.html?m=0
– a summary of articles on Western Civilization with links provided. Requires some
serious reading!
History shows that WC was built on Christianity, Graeco-Roman law traditions and primarily in
Europe – meaning the White race. That's just fact!
White supremacy – if it ever returns – might just save our Western
Civilization!
I had an excellent exchange with a retarded mexican a while back, as the stupid pos was
blabbing that whitey "stole this land from the indigenous people," (HIS people -- -mexican
cretins.)
I said, "Oh really? Hmmm ..what tribe are you from?"
Empty stare.
"Are you Apache? Comanche? Sioux? The El Chapo tribe?"
@Ultrafart the Brave nd is to what they were mislead to believe I see it here with my
African friends, Swiss, other Europeans etc everyone I know has experienced this
So this kind of betrayal and feeling of being tricked also contributes to whether they
assimilate (and what there really is to assimilate into when the new host country has no
culture whatsoever to offer to anyone, including the natives – apart from shopping and
watching TV).
Plus add to this the feeling that say the 800 000 refugees imported last year understand that
Canadistan actually played a role in destroying their countries and their desire to assimilate
or to respect the new country diminishes even further.
"Ron Unz has given the world a forum where countless and controversial and conflicting
points of view are given oxygen and light. This is invaluable and rare."
@Majority of One
How an Amish Gentleman (he is really one) handles a racism issue, how he handles a triggered
lefty, chip on the shoulder, black "British" spoilt snobby urban London girl Sienna on some
bullshit "racist" incident. How wise the Amish are compared the "English" (non Amish White
American folk) around them!!!
One would be surprised (or not so surprised if you do not fall for typical Jew media/ history
stereotypes) that the most snobby arrogant person among the six British youth who went and
lived among the Amish in the USA in this British TV series was the black girl Sienna whose
parents are from Africa.
Check out the comment section, everybody hates Sienna.
So there are approximately 330 million people in America, and the latest vote count shows
that 150 million or thereabouts voted in this election? NO WAY IN HELL. To be honest I don't
think Trump received over 70 million LEGITIMATE VOTES much less Biden. I think they have Biden
at 75 or 77 million right now, can't remember which. LMAO. NO WAY IN HELL JOE BIDEN HAS
RECEIVED 75-77 LEGITIMATE VOTES.
Think about it people. Think of the people too young to vote, the people incarcerated, the
people who don't ever vote, the people so old that they just don't give a damn like the ones in
nursing homes, etc. Just the other day, I was talking to the Orkin man who sprayed my house,
and he stated he didn't even vote. Well, given I was flying a Trump flag maybe the guy was
being diplomatic or lying but who knows? I think another LIE in this STOLEN election is the
total vote count. I guess the people who stole the vote for Biden and manufactured that Biden
accumulated close to 80 million votes had to even up Trump's votes to make this fairy tale seem
somewhat believable.
First of all I don't identify as White nationalist. When I lived in a liberal city I
couldn't stand being around White people. I would much rather live in Mexico than around
liberal Whites. Urban Whites especially can be really annoying regardless of politics. They
want to be morally right and feel intellectually superior without having to do any work or give
any explanation as to why. They want to feel cosmopolitan and view any dissention as a thorn in
the side to their unexplained superiority.
Will White people be red pilled by this election? Nope.
We have the internet and most White people can't seem to be bothered with spending a couple
nights reading about how both Con Inc and liberals lie about race. Intellectual laziness
abounds.
Most of those Trump voting Republicans really believe that we can turn every Black family
into the Huxtables with the right level of minimal government/low taxes/etc. They really
believe this. It's shocking.
There is no silver lining with this election. It's a disaster.
Too many White people choose to live in a false reality where race doesn't exist. Our best
hope is that White egalitarian leftists breed out themselves off by having few or no children.
Then we'll probably have to align with Hispanics to end the welfare system. Don't get mad at me
for pointing that out. Go take it up with the moron conservatives still pushing Alisa Rosenbaum
fantasy over facts.
Two things can happen: that Trump wins (which would be something of justice), and that the
whites go looking for their places in the United States.
In fact, this is what has already happened in California for years: whites are leaving that
state.
God forbid! But IF Beijing Biden slithers his way into the WH the 1619 Project will be the
theme of the US Govt. Which, of course, means that we don't belong here..Well, if we don't
belong here then we can only go back to Europe. Who cares if the anti-white EU countries don't
want us? They've spent the last several years taking in destructive, horny, hostile
opportunistic welfare shopping scum if there's room for them there's room for us. Unless they
want us to stay here and be genocided like the S. Africans.
Concluding paragraphs to Chuck Baldwin's latest column, Almost No One Else Will Say It,
So I Must :
That's why Benjamin Netanyahu already congratulated Joe Biden on an election victory --
even before the election was firmly decided. He is keenly aware of the exponential rise in
Zionist power and influence that accompanies the Harris family rise to the White House.
Amazingly, many evangelicals continue to stupidly believe that Netanyahu (and Zionism
itself) is a friend of the United States and a friend of Christianity. What dupes!
In a real sense, the rise of the Marxist attack against America, personified in Kamala
Harris, can be, at least partially, attributed to the misguided support for Zionism among our
evangelical churches.
As I said, almost no one else will say it, so I must.
To bolster your argument against the Left, instead of identifying first as a "White
Nationalist" you should say, simply, that you are an Ethnic Nationalist. That makes your
argument harder to refute and highlights the logical inconsistency of the Left's argument,
which, at its core, is really just anti-White.
As I point out to people, I'm a Tibetan Nationalist and an Anglo-American Nationalist; a
Black Nationalist but also a White Nationalist. All ethnic groups are entitled to their
sovereignty, lands and control of their borders. Humans are tribal and need common cultural
ties to maintain social capital and build a functioning society. This should be common sense,
but somehow it's instead become taboo.
In other words, Trump made the same arguments Republicans have been making for 50 years.
Coincidentally, he also pursued the same policies Republicans have been pursuing for 50
years.
Longer viewer:
Folks are acting like elections have not been stolen in the past. Get real.
Folks are acting like our government has not been completely corporate-owned since Reagan. Get
real.
Folks are acting like the Talmudic syndicate has played no role whatsoever in this scam. Get
real.
Someone for the love of God please start an American Nationalist conference The goal of
the conference: to discuss starting a political party that will be a valid third party
option.
National Justice Party Statement on the 2020 Presidential Election
Everyone hates White people and yet everyone wants to move to White countries.
Leftists tell us this is because Whites are bad and have colluded against everyone. That is
the reason behind their success.
So build America in Africa without them? Why is this not the plan? Would it not prove that
egalitarians were correct all along? Funny how the plan of the leftist to move the third world
to White countries. There seems to be zero dissention along this line. All leftists agree by
their actions that assimilating White countries for their ideals is more viable than building a
new America without Whites.
Trump is taking on Big Ag. He's taking on the military as best he can; he hasn't started any
new wars.
Trump is taking on the U.S. multinational corporations who took the jobs overseas
(tariffs).
Trump is taking on the fraud in the election system. DNC's top election guru just resigned
(yeah, I bet he did!) Trump is exposing the algorithms in the Dominion Voting System.
Trump got 72 million votes. He owns the Republican Party now! They have been fighting him up
until this point, but they are now realizing that they are nothing without Trump.
If Trump were to start a third party, look out! How's that for leading?
The very first white man who tied to live with the Stone Age Siberian Savages was Etienne
Brule. He was part of Cartier's exploration team in the early 1600's.
When Cartier returned and inquired about Etienne he was informed that the Siberian savages
murdered, scalped and ATE him.
May the spirits of Siberian Savages be suffering the endless tortures they would visit on
their victims.
What makes you think the Chinese or Japanese would have left the Americas alone?
This is some egalitarian fantasy of the Americas remaining scarcely populated with warring
tribes. As if the rest of the world would have left it as a nature preserve.
It was never a country and in fact the tribes would align with warring European countries
against other tribes. That of course probably wasn't mentioned in your White guilt history
class. Numerous tribes used Europeans and their tools as a means of enacting revenge against
their traditional enemies. Read about the Blackfoot for a politically incorrect reality
check.
I like to think that the Indians were just exacting pure revenge against the gun toting euro
invaders and your wrong i am of irish white heritage and don't make me laugh about torture and
despicable human acts as i have seen those pictures of massive piles of bison that were gunned
down by invading euro scum that were attempting to starve the natives.
It doesn't matter who the president is, you know that Hillary Clinton didn't lose and Trump
didn't win, but here's the president, Obama didn't want to do exactly what you're doing now,
and he didn't want to launch an investigation. You are directly pushing America into a civil
war, by a "fraud of choice" that has no evidence. Indeed, you are pushing everyone into the
catastrophe of the Civil War. You know very well that everything Trump claimed was a lie, and
half the world was accused of lies, nowhere is evidence and the UN laughs at him, but you claim
that now Trump claims the truth once in his life, again without a dictatorship.
If Trump loses, the consequences would be dire.
We are interested in Trump winning.
On the other hand, the strength of the whites was their Christian and authentic religion. Not
their race. In the Middle Ages it was the Church that defended Europe from the Muslim
invasion.
Nowadays an infiltrator is seated in Pedro's See, Bergoglio does not think like a Catholic.
Only with that faith can our culture and our lives be saved.
Genocide not. The fake "indigenous people" / little dummies are everywhere and have a
complete free ride with plenty of taxpayers cash ("rent") to stay loaded on, to avoid any
personal responsibility.
And clearly, American Indians were "xenophobic" / "racist" in resisting European migrants.
recommended:
It seems rather odd and highly suspicious that so called NATIONALISTS CONSERVATIVES (whites)
propose cowardice in the face of aggression they all claim to be so outraged so contrived BUT
all of them propose INACTION now this is the main reason YOU/WE are LOSING America we bowed our
heads, weeping sorrowful and thats all The DEMS implemented 4yrs of on the ground campaign of
terror they were called BLMANTIFA a permanent campaign of terror And NOW the CONSERVATIVE
NATIONALISTS suggests stupidity separation, repatriation, secession ALL DUMB STUPID RANTS
UTOPIAS .WE MUST STAND OUR GROUND NOW NOW History, legality, morality, is on OUR SIDE and
people know it .THE MAIN THRUS SHOULD BE MUST BE MASSIVE RED STATES REVOLT 1776mII REDUX .By
the time dictator Biden finish his first year HE would had used his excutive powers, and in
coalition with BLUE/RINOS enacted a NEW CONSTITUTION, REDO THE ELECTORAL FRAMEWORKS so that NO
RED Nationalist will ever be elected again,,,never,,,so called ANTI TRUMP LEGISLATIONS which
really means ANTIWHITE laws an AMERICAN JIM CROW LAWS IN REVERSE dont you see the perils to
come its not about utopias, there is no tomorrow..unless WE FIGHT NOW mass revolts
peacefully???? 1776 II MILITIAS..
the Japanese too cannot live and do well in live in multiracial Ottoman-Byzantine like
societies.
Isn't there a large Japanese diaspora doing well in Brazil and Peru?
The Chinese too will be rejected by the darkie masses in the future,
I have a hard time seeing the Chinese falling for that shuck and jive unless they become a
completely Christian society, all the way to the top of the pyramid.
right now, less than a week after polls closed And, as the Biden camp continues to
vote
I don't know whether or not red-pilling Trump's fans will help, but it should already be
obvious to those with eyes open that too many people believe whatever they see and hear on TV.
It's entirely possible that most of the Trump supporters won't be red-pilled at all.
Even Americans who don't particularly like or trust Trump may be disgusted enough with the
blatant media push to declare Biden the winner, that they decide not to allow it any more. That
may be enough to get some of them to decide that waiting for government to "do something" is a
waste of time.
If the rioters decide to riot in celebration of Biden's win, or in outrage over his win
being revealed as fraud and rejected, some number of Americans could just decide to shut the
rioters down themselves. It wouldn't be that hard for armed Americans who know how to fight,
and there are hundreds of thousands of combat vets with recent experience who just might go
ahead and do it.
One thing's for sure, they won't be giving any warning on social media before they hit
back.
@christine and despicable human acts as i have seen those pictures of massive piles of
bison
They tortured the bison! The horror!
I guess you have never heard about Buffalo Jumps, then?
You may claim to be white, but it's clear you have had your empty head filled by Anti-White
delusional lies. The Siberians were so savage that during the French Indian wars the French
troops finally refused to fight alongside their Indian allies, because they were savage to the
point that the French viewed them as being similar to the THE XENOMORPHS from the movie
Aliens.
excellent. In The last 20 years they have changed deeply. Because only 17 years ago they
were all gung ho about destroying Iraq. Perhaps a bit of depleted uranium shot into Peoria will
cement their views.
@Bill lifetime. The only politicians who really gave a damn about Whites in my lifetime
were Dixiecrats, and probably most of them were good ole boy crooks who just talked a good game
but CAVED eventually. Hell, Strom Thurmond fathered a mixed race daughter IF I am not mistaken.
Tell me what did all the Presidents from JFK to Obama do to make this nation better? And
before you give the standard JFK horseshit, JFK was all for the multiracial plan for America,
and he sure supported integration of schools down South. Okay, let me hear what President in
the last century REALLY LOOKED OUT FOR WHITE INTERESTS OVER JEWISH OR NONWHITE INTERESTS. I got
time and I am all ears.
The point is whites did nothing that any one of those tribes wouldn't have done to all the
others if they had had the power to do it. (If anything, whites treated them much better than
they treated each other.) We might look at that from the vantage point of 21st century morality
and call it awful – just as we might with the Mongol or Islamo-Arab conquests – but
it would remain 'ancient history,' not something to constantly dredge up in order to instill
racial guilt and gain political advantage.
We'll see about the "red pilled" part, but even liberals out here, even ones who voted
Biden, are NOT convinced Biden-Harris won legitimately. And who knows? Maybe the criminal
psycho elites realized perhaps awakening a couple 'o hundred million gun owners was a but
premature and will "allow" Trump to retake the White House I mean, Biden's doing what Biden was
gonna do .make the whole damned thing look illegit. And NOBODY out here has anything but
distrust when it comes to Harris one liberal from Commie-fornia who lived there knows Harris is
evil.
Really it all come down to these–will we let them take our guns, will we let them
force vaccines on us, and will we let them burn this nation to the ground while forcing all
rural folks into stack 'n packs, Agenda 2030 style?
@utu o if there was ever a serious prospect it might happen, they would probably want to
separate as well. And why not? Ultimately, we're all better off living around people more like
ourselves than less like ourselves. (Duh)
And why would anyone be required to call himself a 'bantustan nationalist'? When
Mexicans arrive in America they don't suddenly cease to call themselves Mexican, so why should
Americans stop calling themselves American simply because of an altered political geography?
For an intelligent man, it's astonishing how quickly you transform into a blithering idiot the
moment you begin discussing issues that emotionally disturb you.
Good suggestion. Perhaps some can think of others. Either way, it's good because it's more
cultural than political, at least it sounds that way, and because it puts the focus exactly
where it belongs, on our basic freedoms.
One thing's for certain. Putting ideology and politics before race and culture, ie; Right =
White (and visa versa) will be like shooting yourself in the foot before running a marathon in
difficult terrain. In other words, it'd be a piece of unforgivable stupidity. And irreversible
as well. Since, if this is flubbed, a second chance will not come again.
I guess for some white yanks the truth about the birth of their country is a little too
close to the bone for their liking and a bit too raw and painful but the truth is the truth and
shame on all the euro invaders of all of the Americas in the past.
Try coming out to rural remote far west Texas .Austin isn't all of Texas. And I said rural,
not El Paso!
And, oh yeah, Midland-Odessa, Lubbock, Amarillo that is, all of Texas except El Paso westward
of the San Antonio-Austin lib-tard areas (including artsy-fartsy Marfa they may like Biden but
the don't like Harris if you know what I mean).
JSI is basically a criminal organization that wants power. Everything they say and do flows
from this. They are The People Of The Lie . The point is, you might be able to obtain
control of a culture or civilization through lies. But you can't run it that way.
And now we're back to the point you raise in your comment and what it directs our attention
to. It directs our attention to what we're witnessing, to what anyone can see as soon as they
stop talking about how powerful they are and how screwed everyone else is. Enough! No. What
we're witnessing is nothing less than The Pyrrhic Victory Of Jewish Supremacy Inc .
@christine I think your heart is in the right place, I and I respect that, but instead of
trying to right things that are ancient history how about focusing on what IS HAPPENING TO YOUR
PEOPLE RIGHT NOW. Whites are being slaughtered in South Africa. Little children being held
hostage while they watch their mother raped right in front of their eyes, entire families of
Whites being butchered by racist Black thugs. I am all for you pointing out how Whites were
guilty of mistreating the Native American, but I would also ask you to point that passion to
something that is going on RIGHT NOW, something that didn't happen long ago and can't be
changed. YOUR OWN PEOPLE are suffering, does that not bother you?
What a bad joke the dissident right wignat faction turned out to be.
Richard Spencer and the bugger accounts aligned with his views are doing nothing but
spamming straight-up system propaganda, a lot of which has migrated onto these pages.
The author Jonathan Van Maren seems to think the American electorate has realigned itself
with social conservatism + economic populism on the GOP side, and progressivism, elitism and
Big tech on DNC side. Based on this, he calls for the GOP to use social conservatism
specifically anti-abortion, anti-assisted suicide, pro medicare, pro social security to appeal
to a coalition of working class America including blacks and Latinos.
The main reason people like me voted for Trump is because of immigration and
non-interventionism which he promised on his campaign trail in 2016. We want to see America
end the endless wars and the endless immigration . I could care less about abortion,
assisted suicide, medicare or social security.
Once again, the social conservatives missed the boat and are now calling for more coalition
with Latinos, which probably means support for more immigration as George W. did, because
Latinos make good conservatives, right? When will these idiots wake up?! Have they been reading
Ron Unz's misleading articles on Hispanic crime? Ann Coulter was so right. The Republican party
is the stupid party, and it's because it's run by tone deaf "conservatives" that run webzines
like TAC and National Review.
Just read at The Duran: "Obama lackey John Pilger resigns from DOJ election crimes job."
Maybe Mr. Pilger knows something too? Maybe he resigned before being fired? Maybe those
Dominion Voting machines have been compromised using algorithms?
This is heating up. I actually believe Trump will win.
@Tucker y the Jews? Has it worked for European man, or, with its strictures to turn the
other cheek, has it made him a second class citizen? That was my thoughts when I saw so many
disgusting, pathetic whites bowing down and kissing the boots of BLM Supremacists this summer.
In any case, unless one is so hopelessly wedded to Christianity that his mind is closed, an
article written by Thomas Dalton, "Christianity: The Great Jewish Hoax," has taken the
Christian myth head on (National Vanguard, 9 Aug 2020). Indeed, as Israel-first Evangelicals
have taken control of Christianity in the US, we should ask if devotion to a Middle Eastern Jew
named Jesus is helping or hurting our cause.
@Richard B r with the foreigners; and this spirit of wear, principle of any cowardice, is
so natural in their hearts, that it is the continual object of the figures that they employ in
the species of eloquence which is proper for them. Their glory is to put at fire and blood the
small villages they can seize. They cut the throat of the old men and the children; they hold
only the girls nubiles; they assassinate their Masters when they are slaves; they can never
forgive when they are victorious: they are enemy of the human mankind. No courtesy, no science,
no art improved in any time, in this atrocious nation. -- Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs
(1756) Tome 2, page 83
@Ultrafart the Brave pon its introduction. Since then the government has provided tax
incentives to people paying for private insurance. Basically you pay a reduced medicare levy if
you have private insurance. The Australian medical system has it's faults like long waiting
times for elective surgery etc but it's still pretty good.
On the immigration front though Australia is in worse shape than the US. We have a much
smaller population and it doesn't take as much third world immigration to turn it into a third
world country. Especially since many use New Zealand as a back door into Australia. Australia
is already unrecognisable from even just 20 years ago. In another 20 it's likely to resemble
Brazil.
Trump has now moved over to Gab, a free-speech platform that has embraced thought
criminals of all kinds (so far). Trump's supporters will follow him to Gab -- millions of
them. They will read the other stuff and become more red-pilled. You can almost predict this
one with mathematical certainty.
Lots of conservatives are now departing Facebook and Twitter for other social media
platforms that are less restrictive. This will further separate the left and right in this
country, as they'll have even that much less in common. It will separate families, with
liberals staying on Facebook, and their conservative family members leaving, decreasing
communication between them, especially now with all the Corona bulls ** t being used to
suppress the association of people in meat-space.
But, anyone who actively promotes the idea that Whites should just completely opt out is
pushing advice that is exactly what our mortal enemies want most.
They are oddly quiet about it. Unlike everything else they want.
White people are going to need to get good at living in diaspora, since that's where we are
at now. We need to adopt tribal methods similar to the way other tribes operate. For example,
spending a little more to buy from our own people. Finding a way to brand white ownership.
Finding a way to associate said white ownership with white activism.
It is no good giving money to a local, vice signalling white traitor. It would be better to
get cheap products from a multinational, at least you get value for money. However, we need to
find ways of rewarding our own financially. We need to ensure that money goes out for things of
value – land, buildings, shares of companies, etc. Money comes in from the fruit of our
labor and intellect.
It isn't going to be easy because Jews have attempted to criminalize many of the things we
would like to do (specifically us, while giving other races/ethnicities a pass), but we can
find ways around that.
It will be easier to live in diaspora than via separatism.
The author is an idiot. To begin with, not all 70 million or so people who voted for Trump
were White. He received, what, 30% of the Hispanic vote. Also, approximately 20% of black males
voted for Trump.
Your guy just lost flatout. He was unpopular.
70 million means what? I call that pathetic compared to what Biden got.
Btw, you guys were able to be racist the last four years. Sit your butt down the next 4 years
because you White nationalists suck ass.
Urban Whites don't like you, period.
Whites invented everything? Even if that was the case, it came from URBAN WHITES. You mother
fuckers, whose ancestors are probably farmboys, only take credit.
What have rural whites achieved? Nothing besides taking credit.
Besides all this, due to immigration, most of the entrepreneurs and inventors are liberal
immigrants.
Bottomline is that liverals invented everything. Rural hillbillies did shit!
@randall r n that over the top cartoon character seriously to being with. He reminded me of
some of those (((actors))) who frequented those '90's talk shows like Donahue or Doprah Pigfrey
portraying "White Supremacists" or foaming at the mouth skinhead so called "neo-Nazis." haha. I
think they found out that half of those characters were Jews who worked for the ADL or at least
some them were. All portrayed the same old stereotype of an evil White racist who shocked the
audience by saying "niggers" or just portraying anyone who is pro-White civil rights as a
maniacal neanderthal. My gaydar always went off every time I watched a video of Spencer
speaking that MANUFACTURED horseshit anyhow.
Only the Christians. The rest can "go" back to Arabia.
Mohammedans are our enemy. Their prophet said so. Racially, Arabs are just poor, stupid
Jews– unless they live above oil, then they're rich, stupid Jews. The problem with your
analysis is that it isn't anti-Semitic enough .
And tell blacks that Jews exploit them for profits.
Tell Mexicans that Jews hog all the wealth.
They already know. They don't care. Just someone different to kiss up to.
@tomo istic culture that is foreign to them and which makes them feel alone and inferior.
So they respond accordingly. The same is true for young Canadians in general.
I agree that immigrants are no longer assimilating, but not because Canada lacks a strong
sense of national identity. The main reasons are demographic and technological. Immigrants now
arrive in such large numbers that they end up interacting only with each other. They can also
watch TV programming in their own language, via the Internet or cable TV, and communicate with
people back home via Skype or social media.
Assimilation takes effort, even in ideal conditions, so more and more immigrants are taking
the easy way out. They learn enough English or French for work, and that's usually enough.
@lavoisier he government has to stop shoving diversity down our throats continuously.
I think this is one area where most objective people can agree.
Idiotic attempts by governments at social engineering and correcting past injustices by
penalising the present population continue to be rolling disasters worldwide.
I would think the German people might eventually rebel against their perpetual financial
tribute to the Holocaust doctrine, if not for the current crop of self-inflicted immigration
problems engulfing Europe.
I also suspect that the "white supremacist" propaganda isn't a benevolent attempt to correct
society's problems. Rather, it looks more like part of a coordinated destructive strategy to
dismantle the existing society. Wielgus , says:
November 12, 2020 at 7:49 pm GMT • 1.0 days ago
Miller's maternal grandfather had sought to emigrate to the USA from Lithuania and got off
the ship at its destination, which he thought was New York. It was in fact Cork in Ireland. His
daughter, Miller's father, became a well-known novelist in Ireland.
For me its more about recognition of past evils and their karmic effect on a nation and the
color of skin doesn't come into it at all really but i do have a real soft spot for the native
North American Indian cause because i have had shamanic past life recollections of being one
and so i will always side with the Indians over the disgusting European invaders of North
America and i will never ever forget those photos i have seen of absolutely humungous piles of
shot Bison that were killed in an attempted genocide of the Indians and if the Indians scalped
many out of revenge then i hope that the pain was excruciatingly intense.
Here is something to consider: Liberals in general are happy people. Conservatives, on the
other hand, have a victim mentality.
You could see that conservatives had this victim mentality even under Trump.
Also, from my own experience, the conservative types have fucked up lives. Due to their own
issues, they lash out.
Could it not be that the reason you have a bad life is due to your own problems? Instead of
blaming immigrants or blacks and hispanics, consider looking at your own life.
"It came from urban whites". At the time of the greate innovative wave in the US there was
no such thing as "Urban" citizenry, as almost all major towns were located directly within
farming territory, and a cosmopolitan mentality was nowhere to be found, guys like Edison,
Ford,Tesla, held absolutely no connection to any sort of "Liberal" worldview.
Name a few of "Liberal" "Inventions" Come on give a list thereof.
You are a bloody ignoramous and full of shit up to your ears. You have no clue as to what
you are blathering about.
AJM "Mensa" qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army vet, and pro Jazz artist.
Logic is certainly not your strong suit. Why would people of any color capable of anything
worth mentioning bow down to a corrupt senile stuffed shirt?
@Questioner nk it would probably be best for you and all those who agree with you to
kill their family and extended family, and then blow their own brains out. Firstly, to atone
for "white guilt" and "white privilege" and secondly as a constructive means of reducing the
white population in these "stolen" Injun lands. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Of course, if you worthless cunts can't summon the nerve to do that, then you should at the
very least, REMOVE YOUR OWN WHITE ITINERANT ASS from this "stolen land".
@Muaddib The average Biden voter = anti-White and yes there are anti-White white people, I
call them WINOs short for White In Name Only or better yet, white traitor trash
I think liberals have went the way of the Dodo Bird. And no, racist Jews, who PRETEND to
love everyone Black, Brown, etc., anyone except Whites are only pretending to love POC to USE
THEM against Whitey. Case in point, in Israel they export African Jews all the time proving
that Judaism isn't a religion but a race. Nope, I doubt Sammy Davis Jr. would have ever truly
been welcomed to move to Israel. And there is no such thing as a nonwhite liberal, nonwhites
are tribal as hell and only out for themselves.
@Authenticjazzman ated? How about, uh, everything, including the internet you are using?
Yes, and immigants and minorities contributed.
If you don't like liberals, maybe you should start by turning off your computer.
But let me guess, you want to breathe the liberal air.
You brag about your Mensa score. And what did you achive with that? Hatred for liberals? So
what good was your Mensa? It was probably a fraud.
Look around you. The world has changed. You are basically an Amish in a sea of modernity.
This is what you get when you don't meet people of all types.
Just old, disgruntled and blaming others because your life wasn't ideal.
Yeah this is why they fill the waiting rooms of shrinks to be pumped full of psycho-drugs,
and resort to "screaming at the sky" when their political party loses an election.
Liberals are the most disturbed, troubled grouping of individuals to be found world-wide.
They are the nut-cases who stick themselves full of needles and pins , and dye their hair blue
so as to present their deranged worldview for all to see.
Again you are a hopeless moron and have no clue as to what you are blathering about.
Here is something to consider: Liberals in general are happy people. Conservatives, on the
other hand, have a victim mentality.
Yes, we've seen myriad examples of those happy, well adjusted, tolerant "Liberal" people
over the last four years. When they're not freaking out or breaking down, they're "lashing out"
in the form of assaulting, burning, destroying, looting, and murdering etc
Is the author of this article a coward – he attacks the weak blacks – and
ignores the overpowering Jews.
Blacks are not America's problem – Jews are.
Do blacks own and or control social media, print media, broadcast media, Congress, the
president, schools, Wall Street, and the Fed – or is it Jews. Be honest.
It is the Jews who siphon our wealth and divide us.
Jews control the cities that are devastated by black crime. Get the Jews out of control, and
things will improve. Guaranteed!
Societies need both a political left and a political right – the Jew control of the
left is killing America. (Actually, they control both.)
Jeff Costello needs to put on his big boy pants and attack the true evil in America.
Plenty in the US are pure Europeans. Many Nordic and German families are recent immigrants.
Old Colonials often have slight Native admixture. Bantu Africans, Aztecs, ect. need to return
all stolen territory aswell then.
And not so long ago Trump and Netanyahu were such buddies
That, my friend, was exactly why I posted that. Thank you for emphasizing the
point.
In case Wally doesn't get it, new boss is much the same as the old boss, and Netanyahu was
never a friend to either, not that it should come as a surprise to anyone. Netanyahu won't give
Trump a second thought after the "ingrovelation."
Huh?
Jews this and that. This is the problem with White Nationalists. You believe in conspiracy
theories.
Newsflash: Soros does not control anything. He is old, and about to die. He has money. He is
pretty much a moderate.
Qanon is stupidity. If any Mensa guy here believes in the stupidity known as Qanon, consider
a retest.
Comments like this, "while our blacks have been here a long time and some of them do sing,
dance, and dribble well, they are mostly parasites who contribute almost nothing to the society
except grief.", are all too common in white nationalist circles and gives the illusion of truth
to the Jewish propaganda about us.
One has to wonder if that is the intention. It basically says white nationalists hate everyone
but themselves which is exactly what Jews are saying about us in the propaganda system
This is not a closed site! Anyone can come in here and read these tacky remarks.
I think some of you need to follow the Jewish example which is hate the goy while you pretend
to help them
In case you didn't know, non-whites are about 50% of the population now and considering all the
fire power is in support of them against us. perhaps we can find another way to advocate our
predicament
I don't know their political views or what passes for a liberal but one thing is certain
WHITES have contributed more than all the other races combined. Henry Ford, Wright Brothers,
Tesla, Thomas Edison, etc., I don't think those guys were Jews or negroes.
My guess is YOU ARE NOT A LIBERAL, you are either an anti-White racist Jew, and or some
other form of anti-White degenerate who HIJACKED the term, "liberal." In your case the correct
tag would be, LIEberal.
I think the Irish band Clannad wrote songs about and in solidarity with the North American
Indians, so you could be right.
This genocide and the photographic images from it that i have seen will never be forgotten
by me and the color of the faces of the Europeans with guns doesn't come into it and if i
mentioned 'white euro scum' it was to differentiate between northern Europeans and those a bit
darker/olive skinned southern Europeans that invaded lands further south than todays U.S.A.
It's not language or race or skin colour, its CULTURE.
Hate to break the news to you, bossman, but "language, race and skin color" as well as
religion have very much to do with CULTURE.
The author makes a lot of cogent and well-reasoned points, but his delivery lacks nuance
and has a coarseness which suggests prejudice to the point of racism.
I'm afraid any jackass who accepts or gives credence to the enemy's descriptors of those who
naturally honor and favor their own race to others, does not really deserve to be taken
seriously.
Fwiw, I'm willing to go the step further and view the author as a likely racist and
supremacist. Most people like that have lived sheltered lives and had little exposure to a
variety of peoples. Many of their assertions are simply empty and unaware of ahem the real
world.
You shouldn't make personal statements about people you don't know. You could read more of
this author's work to discover his ideological evolution and that his views result from life
experience and not the lack of it.
The Indians didn't scalp out of revenge, they scalped because they were primitive
savages.
On or about the year 1,300 AD long before the Siberians saw a single white man, one tribe of
Siberians murdered, scalped, and ate every single one of the 498 women and children of the
losing tribe whose men the victorious Siberians had slaughtered.
And we know this because we found the bones of the women and children at Crow Creek in
1978.
Tell me, when you were a Shaman in your past life how much Man Corn did you eat?
@Peter Frost ly of all ages as well as tourist to hear their opinion – and I have
never met anyone who does not agree or has similar stories. People are very lonely here and
there is too much virtue signaling without any virtue. I spent a few months on a placement in
one of the biggest hospitals in Toronto – and what I have seen there confirms my
experience. Every day there was one or two teenagers (white) trying to kill themselves. That's
only what I have seen while on ER. I spoke to mental 'health' patients too.
There is far too much passive aggressive backstabbing here in Canada – definitely more
than I have seen anywhere (I've lived in London, LA, SF, DC, Serbia , Germany etc)
@Trinity ve equal rights. Immigrants have equal rights. DACA folks who came here due to no
fault of their own need to be given a chance to stay here, etc.
2. Social programs can be good for society. Think not just social security, but also healthcare
for all.
When you treat everybody with respect, by nature you are a happy person.
I will tell you something. If somehow all immigrants and minorities were kicked out, you would
still be unhappy. The reason is that you are by nature unhappy.
So think about where your life is. Whose fault is that? Put your ego aside. It was YOUR
decisions.
So why blame anybody else?
Trump did not do much to curb legal immigration especially H1B and international students
until the very end, a couple of months before the election. Now Biden is about to undo
everything and let the MexChindian third world horde wash over us. The dumb millennials who
complained about being unemployed or underemployed with massive student loan debt will have an
even harder time finding a job now. I've often wondered why these idiots still insist on voting
for Biden.
Another regulatory change, now in the proposed rule stage, would eliminate the H-1B visa
lottery in favor of prioritizing applicants earning higher wages.
"It basically will again ice out anyone who's entry-level," said Sharvari Dalal-Dheini,
director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Many
international students use the H-1B visa as a pathway for staying to work in the U.S. after
they graduate.
The least Trump could do on his way out is to finalize this crucial rule as a parting gift
to his base which largely stuck by him. It took him long enough to finally get to this. He
should've cancelled H1b and OPT on Day 1. If he had done that he might have won the
election.
@christine frican children and women, as well as adult males being slaughtered in South
Africa by marauding racist genocidal Blacks?
Hmm, IF you are TRULY concerned about injustice in a demonic world, why aren't you concerned
about Whites?
Do you feel for the Whites who endured the Holodomor? Did you know that Genrikh Yagoda and
Lazar Kaganovich, two chief architects of the systemic starvation of MILLIONS of Ukrainian and
Russian Whites were Jewish?
The FACT THAT YOU DID NOT ADDRESS WHAT IS HAPPENING IN SOUTH AFRICA, just shows me that you
are MORE ANTI-WHITE than someone who really cares about humanity, truth or justice. Hell, you
probably are not even (((Irish.)))
That you americans vote for that mafioso, is beyond comprehension.
You are so extremely stupid, and I am sorry to say, you bring it on all of us!
Why do you even vote for Bidén!?
Vote for Trump and after half term, create a more representative party.
The freest country in the world, and you just let it happen.
Anyway, I dont believe the official result.
You americans have not been that stupid.
Take the banner of Christ!
And reject zionism.
And reclaim youre country!
The world is waiting.
Complete drivel. As a German-American of almost two centuries of heritage, I don't identify
with your labels, priorities or prejudices.
If you're concerned about certain colors of people having more children than you, the
solution is simply to be generous with the Creator with your families. Have more children.
We're dealing with serious control freaks here people. I wish people would just realize that
the COMMUNISTS stole the election and are about to go full Bolshevik on us.
YT is already petrified by blacks at work. One slip up, and it's off to the HR gulag
archipelago, then full termination. Anyone who is not a "true believer" in the Revolution, will
be scheduled for termination.
Amazing how history repeats itself. YT has been so programmed to think of everyone as
"nice," that they can't even come close to imagining that Satanic Marxist pedophiles just stole
a national election.
As if anyone could make peace with such Hellspawn.
That's the facts, Jack. Who gives a Fiddler's fuck if it offends your delicate
sensibilities?
White Christian European people, and White Americans in particular, will apologize when
every other race, nation and religion are duly scrutinized and exposed for their "crimes" and
"atrocities".
Which will most likely happen in the reign of Queen Dick lol
We are not now, nor will we EVER be, ashamed of our history or our people, despite the best
efforts of the Jew Globalist Left.
I would not count on the GOP, even with a 52 vote majority, to stop any attempt at
immigration reform by the Dems. There are enough RINOs in there including both of the R from
Utah(Mike Lee, Mitt Romney), Marco Rubio, Lindsay Graham, Lisa Murkowsky, Joni Ernst, to name
but a few, who could easily go with the Dems on reform.
Mike Lee (R-UT), one of Trump's faves, has been trying to push through the Indian green card
bill S. 386 for at least the last two years. The bill was originally to give employment based
greencards, some 140k per year, to Indian nationals only for the next ten years. After
being blocked 3 times by 3 different senators – Perdue(R-GA), Dick Durban(D-IL), Rick
Scott(R-FL), the bill has morphed into a monster.
With each blockage, the bill keeps getting changed to include more and more beneficiaries.
In its final iteration, it will now 1) up the per country limit for family based greencard from
7% to 15%, 2) completely eliminate the per country cap of 7% for employment based visa, 3)
remove an offset that reduced visas available for Chinese nationals, 4) Reserve a
percentage(didn't say what %) of EB2 and EB3 visas (both for high skills) to nationals from
outside the top two countries (which I am guessing are India and China), with max of no more
than 85% from any single country.
Most importantly, the latest iteration of this bill will treat any Indian who has applied
for a green card as already having one, with all the benefits of a greencard while they wait,
incl. being able to travel, change jobs.
More Americans need to wake up to this type of treasonous bills being pushed by GOP
senators:
There is many Jews here but I see nothing untrue about stating the fact that Blacks
contribute very little. You've stated nothing Blacks contributed and merely whined about Whites
doing what every non-White race does more than Whites. No race has been more of a
"schwartze-lover" than Whites. Whites should be more honest about race and stop believing
Blacks are magical. Whites should not tolerate any bad behavior from Blacks or any non-White
race for that matter.
This is a joke, right? Millions of non-whites are simply going to get up and leave their
homes, jobs, schools, neighborhoods so that Whites can have a little patch of paradise? Has our
dear article author been hitting the crack pipe again?
I got news for you. The world is not flat. Leeches do not suck disease out of humans. The earth
is brown, no longer yellow, red, black, and white. It gets browner every day.
As for a shared culture and a homeland, the whites were the only race dumb enough not to
preserve theirs. Japan is almost 100% Asian. China is Asian. Africa is black. India is Indian.
The USA is a mixture of everything. Europe is a mixture of everything. The whites were the only
race with the inability to preserve a homeland. Hence they are too shortsighted to deserve
one.
Whites need to get increasingly audacious using insulting humor of the Charlie Hebdo, or SNL
kind. It's free speech, right? I feel empowerment growing among Whites during the Voter Fraud
Saga and I think there will be a lot less self-censorship from now on. The hate speech laws
need to be brought to court so that a charge of "racism" has to be substantiated, or otherwise
ruled as a federal hate crime. Who started the whole Racism Industry? Could it have been Jewish
intellectuals in their pursuit of the cultural and economic genocide of Gentiles?
@Felix Krull or more items according to specified parameters.
In common usage, though, "discriminate" is taken to mean the unfair treatment of one party
compared to another. Again, typically regarded as an uncivilised activity. And again, this may
be pertinent within a given context, but is not automatically true.
So, strictly speaking, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with "racism".
However, IMO the author uses language which suggests disdain for black Americans (for
example). If that is an expression of "racism", then it would be in the colloquially "bad"
context.
Regardless, IMO the emphasis on the racial dimension limits the article's perspective. Is
"Trumpism" just a white movement, or is it an American movement, or is it something more (or
less)?
"The Stolen Election Will Red-Pill 70 Million Americans"
Here's a real "red pill" for murkans [and the rest of the world], stated 3 different ways:
"Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure" Robert LeFevere
"Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to
differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a
professional-criminal class." Albert J. Nock
"Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and
counterfeiting [central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very cores,
100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be "reformed"or "improved",simply because of their
innate criminal nature." onebornfree
@anon He's the one the people voted for, not them, and they are just waking up to this now.
It's the same type of diversion the Democrats just tried to pull off with Antifa and BLM.
They got everybody looking at "White Supremacy", racial and identity issues so that you
wouldn't be looking at the money the elites are skimming off the top. I'm sure they could have
cared less about the POC.
The elites are fighting Trump hard; they don't want him changing anything. They knew it
would be mainly "Whites" voting for Trump, so they invented this White Supremacy bullshite.
Yes, the people who voted for Trump ARE interested in immigration, and so is Trump.
stick themselves full of needles and pins , and dye their hair blue so as to present their
deranged worldview for all to see
Yep, that describes it. I understand that a lot of people cannot help being stupid, but I
never understood why people want to aggressively advertise their stupidity. Perverted
exhibitionism, maybe?
Costello seems a strange choice of nom de plume for a white nationalist. I at least identify
the name as Shepardi Jew. The J word never comes up in the article with its problematic issue
of where Jews fit in a white nationalist homeland. Has anyone noticed the only high profile non
retired public figure left with a wasp name and is not black is Homer Simpson? I am of course
exaggerating but the signs are there. With the demise of the white wasps has come the fall of
foundation America. The non wasps don't really share its cultural sentiments. Its sobriety is
lacking except among the best black people who share its names. I am thinking of Ben Carson.
Homer Simpson is a cartoon of a simple slobbish white American. There is no public movement to
remove him of course. So it isn't really surprising America is going the catastrophic way of
her sourthern neighbours.
Q Anon is clearly JFK jr. His crash and recovery was prophesised in the Nostradamus Quatrain
for July of 1999. He carries on the legacy of the Kennedys since grandfather Joe as does his
cousin Robert Kennedy.
Brother Nathanael's latest instalment is a doozy, FAKE NEWS, FAKE ELECTION :
https://www.bitchute.com/embed/LRQK9TfcNJM2/
Hardest-hitting passage:
Cackling Commie Kamal, who humped her way to the top, married Big Tech lawyer Jew, Douglas
Emhoff, a few years back.
The Jew would be "First Man" and you can kiss your First Amendment goodbye.
Big Tech -- (with Emhoff's impending high position and legal conniving) -- will be free to
ban all 'hate speech,' which is 'speech' Jews 'hate' to hear.
And the entire Jew-owned media and their leftist political machine operatives will decide
all elections from henceforth now and forever.
You are about to enter the Twilight Zone -- a Jew-ruled, Jew-ruined, Jew-controlled
America.
@DaveE an mean the need for white unity & power. Or it can mean white power as the
basis for world domination. Nationalism need not be imperialist but often took an imperialist
turn in the past when a nation became very powerful.
In contrast, 'liberation' emphasizes the need for whites to seek emancipation from the current
power that dominates the West and the World which is Jewish Power. (Even 'white national
liberation' sounds better than mere 'white nationalism'.) White Politics that only focuses on
whites and white power is less likely to be appealing than White Politics that seeks freedom
from the actual tyranny that rules the world: Jewish Supremacist Power or JSP.
[MORE]
I think more likely, whites will sink into despair and return to a state of apathy for
politics. I don't see any Republican being able to generate the kind of enthusiasm Trump did.
Tucker Carlson does not have the financial backing or the personality cult. Josh Hawley and Tom
Cotton are two Zionist social conservatives who will revert back to the GOP's standard
abortion, abortion, abortion and say nothing about immigration or non-interventionism to rouse
enough interest from Trump's base.
The only way for white nationalism to stay alive is if Trump stays politically active
through outlets like Newsmax TV and Gab.com ,
and return for another run for office in 2024. However he needs to be very careful. Once he
leaves office he will no longer have the kind of security protection given him as POTUS. There
had been many assassination attempts while he's in office (at least 6 I've heard of), he could
put himself in great danger if he continues to stay in the limelight to position himself for
2024.
As far as a separate whites only nation within the US, look at states that are probably the
whitest – Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, all are heavily (D). A fat lot of good that
does. TX will be (D) by 2024, too many Hispanics and CA transplants, like AZ and NV. Whites are
too splintered, thanks in large part to single white women, who voted 62% in favor of Biden,
compared to married white women who went for Trump 55%. White women are marrying and having
children at an ever lower rate due to lack of eligible men. White women graduated from college
at 60% to 40% compared to white men. As most women only want to marry up, college educated
women rarely want to date much less marry non-college educated men. Due to height issues, most
white women would only date white men or occasionally, black men. Asian and Hispanic men are
too short and unromantic. Meanwhile more and more white men are marrying Asian and Hispanic
women. White women are running out of men to date, marry and start a family. More unmarried
white women means more white votes will be going for Biden.
October 25 (November 7 NS): The October Revolution begins when the Bolsheviks take over
Petrograd (also called the November Revolution if following the Gregorian calendar).
@Thomasina two months before this election that he proposed some rule changes to H1b, and
still none of those rules have been finalized and probably never will. He made these tech
plantation owners many times richer through the stock market, while they treated him with
contempt and helped bring him down. What an idiot!
If Trump had cancelled H1b, OPT, L1 and all other work visas and forced our employers to
hire and train US workers on Day 1 as he promised, he might have won by a landslide by now. The
only group that went down in votes for him in 2020 is white men, because too many feel betrayed
by him in immigration. All he cares about is taking care of Jews and blacks, both Jews in
Israel and on Wall Street. He trusted wormtongue too much, and that's his downfall.
Richard Pilger is (was) the top DOJ Official investigating voter fraud who resigned after
Barr authorized federal prosecutors to pursue "substantial allegations" of voter irregularities
before the election outcome is certified. He is a swamp rat, a cretin, one of many who should
have been drained from the swamp long ago.
John Pilger, on the other hand, is a hero, a filmmaker and journalist with a long, excellent
record of shining light on malfeasance and bad behavior of politicians of every stripe.
The culture of the Chosen people does not understand the concept of compassion. This is
why the world has been in a very sad place for the last hundred or so years since
12.23.1913.
@Priss Factor the white race and goyim in general. Just ask the Palestinians about the
nature of Jewish Power.
Spot on here. Don't expect Biden to let up though. The Jew owned media (both msm and
"conservative" media e.g. Zerohedge, Breitbart, National Review, Fox News) will keep up the
pressure. I see a future, perhaps in two decades, where East Asian immigration to the US will
come to a screeching halt, and most likely even go into reverse as more East Asians return to
their homelands because Jews, negroes, homos, trannies, stupid white women, Latino drug gangs,
Muslim terrorists, Sub Saharan African welfare leeches, Indian H1b slaves with their
clannishness, collusion with Jews and caste-ism make the US an increasingly unlivable hellhole.
Oldtradesman ,
says:
November 13, 2020 at 12:28 am GMT • 19.6 hours ago
I won a lottery given by the renters, and was given free transatlantic transport.
Your line's post-African existence and ability to publicly complain like little girls owes
much to the transatlantic slave trade. Thank the niggas who sold your ancestors into slavery,
nigga.
There's plenty of majority-white states you can move to if Pale Skin is so important to you.
Go to West Virginia, for instance.
Majority-white states with conservative governments tend to be dull, economically depressed
and stagnant. The same will characterize the imaginary white secessionist state you
fetishize.
It's amazing to me that someone could speak with such satisfaction about other people being
subjugated simply because of their color. But then again, animals like you have no morals nor
any decency.
That's why the vast majority of whites in this country will say "no thanks" to your ugly
message.
A lot to unpack by the author, who is simply stating things we already have heard
previously.
"A White Nationalist is someone who believes that white peoples have a right to their own
homelands."
You do have your own homelands. It's just that in a number of cases, you invaded other
homelands for gimmedats and free stuff.
"So that, as a White Nationalist, I am a German nationalist, an English nationalist, a
Scottish nationalist, a French nationalist, etc. Or, at least, I support all those
nationalisms."
And what about Eastern and Southern Europeans? Why no example of you being a Polish
nationalist or a Slavic nationalist? Remember, these groups were deemed to be other than
heritage Americans–dirty, filthy papists who should have never entered our shores with
their alien mannerisms.
"To be a white nationalist in America is really to recognize that the core "American people"
are the white people whose ancestors built the country and who continue to pay for it. Thus,
American White Nationalism = American nationalism."
The reality is that American nationalism is defined by each person and group how they view
it.
"Since it now looks impossible to go back to the good old days when we had blacks in
complete subjection"
Slavery and Jim Crow laws were decidedly anti-American nationalism, and were patently unjust
and immoral.
"white Americans will never work toward a white American homeland unless they are aware of
themselves as White Americans"
We are aware of ourselves as white Americans, just not in the manner you prefer. Do we not
have agency? Must we submit to your definition of what is and what is not a white
nationalist?
"that we effectively secede from the USA and carve out our own white space (or spaces)
within North America. It is this latter option that now seems like it may be our only option,
and something we must work toward."
It will take a fight. Will you be front and center, or far away from the hostilities?
"The country was already fractured along political lines. Now it is completely broken Now
their faith has been completely and irreparably shattered. And this is hugely significant for
us And those many millions of whites are now choking down a gigantic red pill. As we all know,
the red pill is the path to liberation."
What you are doing here is ASSUMING. The "us" is not "we". It's only those people who you
know for absolute certain are on your side.
"It seems that there is credible evidence that there was voter fraud in the election"
More like accusations that need to meet the burden of proof.
"Take it from me -- from my own personal experience: once you have accepted that one big
thing is a total sham, you begin to wonder whether everything else is."
So why would we want to be duped like you?
"It would take whites being pushed to a point where they are so angry they speak and behave
imprudently, damning the consequences."
LOL. I've heard this argument for the past 40 years! It's always a "well, we are upset now,
but just want until we really get mad, then we will put heads on pikes". Either put up or shut
up.
The situation is somewhat better for young whites whose parents were immigrants. Their
family structure is more stable, and they have a possible escape route. I know several who have
"returned" to Europe, even though they were born here. But it's stupid and ignorant to tell
old-stock Canadians they have that option. My ancestors left England in the 19th century, and
the ancestors of French Canadians left France in the 17th and 18th centuries. We're
indigenous.
I agree that "people are very lonely here" but that's relatively recent. The breakdown of
the family began in the 1960s and became "normal" in the 1990s. Again, it has nothing to do
with climate or geography -- other than the fact we're next door to the United States and its
culture.
tomo, I have been thinking a great deal about income inequality lately (especially the
relative income hypothesis (i.e., all of our social problems are caused by differences in
income)). I would love to hear your comments on this question given your wide ranging
experiences around the globe. Would life really be better for us all if we
Scandanavianized?
Brazil (Portugal) was the largest consignee of African slaves in both absolute numbers and
on per capita white colonizer basis. The Anglo North American mainland was far less of a slave
based economy. Brazil was also the last nation in the Americas to outlaw slavery -- and it was
done without 600,000 white men slaughtering each other and burning the defeated side's country
to the ground.
"I think more likely, whites will sink into despair and return to a state of apathy for
politics."
If you are someone who "doesn't want to get your hopes up" or "is afraid to be disappointed"
or "is concerned that it might be a trap" or "seriously hope you're wrong", or sees doom in
every direction, then this is not the place for you. I'm not saying that you're a bad person or
that anyone here wishes you ill. I'm simply stating a simple fact: this is not the place for
you. No one here is interested in your fears, your worries, your psychological vagaries, or
your concerns.
My ancestors didn't own slaves, but it wouldn't matter if they did. The statement remains,
Troof's post-African line owes its very existence and ability to complain like little bitches
to the transatlantic slave trade. Falsify it or fuck off, traitor.
The Dems were quite determined to remove Trump from office by hook and by crook. First by
the fabricated Russiagate fake story When they did not succeed by impeachment. Now today by a
fraudulent election. They, the MIC appear to have succeeded. We are back in the Bush/Obama
era.
Your point about the slaughter in the USA is well taken. Nevertheless, I believe it was
unnecessary and that the war there wasn't truly about slavery. Hell, I lived in an African
nation for three and a half years and saw some slavery first hand; that was 40 years ago, mind,
and the slaves were by and large as happy as clams. WASPy culture is peculiar if you ask me,
which of course you didn't, but even so Who are the "slaves" now in the USA? Hmmm?
Corvie's "moral authority" is equivalent to the Negro chieftain who sold Troof's Negro
ancestor into slavery in exchange for pretty rocks and trinkets, and less than the
"white-debils" who bought him.
@Corvinus those people worried about kissing Black ass are either COWARDS like all those
white traitor trash rich kids or Jews who really use Blacks as pawns. More than likely that
rich leftist self hating white trash is the person who owned slaves or some Jew who blames it
all on Whitey. Either way, Whites have been enslaved themselves by Arabs and are in some ways
slaves today in their own land.
You worried about Blacks, sucka, why does Israel push out Black Jews? Jive talkin', sucka,
keep it a hunnert up in here, turkey. Why did Leo Frank try to blame a Black man for his crime?
lololol. Cue the Bee Gees "Jive Talkin" for all the (((trolls))) up in here. Yo, playa, we gotz
dis.
"Because it was cheaper to have nigger's do it, so your type could purchase it."
I know, it is the inherent nature of Southrons to be lazy. It's in born.
"You are a disgrace, Corvie,"
I'm not the one who has made empty threats of violence on a opinion webzine against a woman
(snicker snack). You said, "Nancy, you are definitely the type of Irish I would have no trouble
killing, along with Joe Biden and John Brennan". You've sunk to a new low.
@Montefrío he bulk of black slaves went to the Spanish colonies, not the American
colonies"
Could you please cite supporting evidence for this assertion?
All the academic accounts I've read indicate that only about 5% of the African slaves shipped
across the Atlantic were sent to the mainland English colonies that became the United States,
while the rest went to areas of Latin America and the Caribbean. However, these latter included
Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch colonies, as well as Spanish ones. The reason their need
for slaves was so enormous was that the death rate in the plantations producing sugar and other
lucrative crops was extremely high. Rogue , says:
November 13, 2020 at 2:15 am GMT • 17.8 hours ago
Did lactase persistence originate in southern Africa?
Egalitarian response:
Oh but that's the exception along with any other non-cognitive changes we might accept if you
prove they exist. But we won't talk about them and will keep telling children that everyone is
African.
Imagine if other fields of study had to follow this insanity.
American wolves don't exist unless you are talking about DNA changes in American wolves that
separate them from European wolves. But other than those changes that would denote a different
subspecies they don't exist.
"""But all the voices on the far-Right who labeled Trump "a distraction" have now been
proved correct. Trump actually wound up doing little for white people -- despite being
continually vilified by the Left as a white supremacist""""
At least the author got that right. Trump was elected to remove the illegal aliens (almost
all of them non-white) and he did practically nothing in 4 years. It would have been easy to
make them self-deport by taking away their jobs and freebies but he didn't do it.
Thank you, sir, particularly for the multi-national breakdown, so to speak.
When all is said and done, it was an ugly business, but long ago was long ago, and imho it
has little to do with the world today. I'm Irish, and "we" weren't well treated long ago
either, but we don't whine or whinge much. I wish that were true of others whose ancestors
suffered hard times.
Me? At 74, life is wonderful! May it be so for all here!
The Stolen Election Will Red-Pill 70 Million Americans is what the Establishment/Trump hope
actually means The Stolen Election Will Keep 70 Million Americans on the Republicrat
Plantation
Imagine thinking rich white conmen like Trump give a shit about you as a "white nationalist"
or that Trump or GOP are against non-white immigration. Hahahahahahhahaha
Delusional. Trump wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire. He and everyone around him have
already made it clear you racist cracka ass niggaz aren't welcome in his circle or the GOP.
Oprah Winfrey, Lil Pump, Lil Wayne and Kanye have more clout with Trump than you clowns. You
should ask yourself why that is.
You, average white guy are no better than a dindu or a beaner in the eyes of rich
capitalists. In fact you're less to them because you demand a living standard and wages that
the beaner doesn't.
Let me know when Trump invites some homeless white veterans or any poor cracka for that
matter to fill his hotels, you know since he cares so much for the white race. Yall should
really take a look around if you believe these rich white guys are your allies. "White
nationalism" is a hoax.
The rich white capitalist will stab you in the back every time, history has proven this over
and over again, you're nothing but wage slaves, tax donkeys and cannon fodder to them,
cracka.
Every election is stolen by the rich capitalists that own all the candidates and all the
media. The CIA and Wall St run the country, not puppet politicians
This is not your country. It is up for sale to the highest bidder, welcome to capitalism.
There are despots in Saudi Arabia that "own" more of this country than you losers. Poor low IQ
right wingers, keep believing those fairy tales your owners like telling you. Hahahahaha
@Anonymous ards possessors of illicit drugs, but no -- Hunter is special!). Biden loves,
loves the bomb, and he supported all 'humanitarian" interventions (mass-slaughters) on behalf
of the war profiteers and zionists. Or perhaps you are fond of the murderous Clinton, and the
Schiff-Schumer-Nadler triumvirate of traitors working diligently to destroy the US Consitution?
Do you really believe in the patriotism of McCabe, Strzhok, Comey, Brennan, and Dm.
Alperovitch? Too much FakeBook can be detrimental to one's cognitive function.
The woke crowd of 'progressives' is too much into the cheap revolutionary rhetoric
skillfully inserted into their brains by Bernays' pupils working for MSM.
The whole premise of the multi-cult Left is that divers racial minority groups,
sanctimonious yankees and perverts join together under the aegis of Jewry to socially
marginalize the rest of society. You cannot listen to these people for more than a minute
without hearing them vent hatred against the NORMAL people. There's a reason the Jews are so
dead-set against the way the white world was not too long ago. It's normal, it's sane, and they
DON'T FIT IN. Their depraved appetites and megalomania don't fit in with Western, Christian
Civilization.
@Corvinus s))) and many of them looked and acted like Corvinus.
Slavery is ANCIENT HISTORY and your kind was very well involved in it, same as a lot of
pompous Yankees who claim they fought to end slavery, blah, blah. The fact of the matter is
that only a tiny percentage of Whites ever owned slaves in the South. Poor Whites weren't
treated much better than Blacks for that matter, maybe YOUR ANCESTORS OWNED SLAVES, Corvie,
just like good ole SJW Anderson Cooper.
Fact is Blacks are not exactly saints when it comes to the African Slave Trade
themselves.
How about we stick to this century, (((Corvie.))) I don't see or hear Whites whining about
being enslaved by Arabs.
The MSM, FakeBook, Twitter, and Google must be demolished, considering their willful
treasonous activities during the American color revolution (Russiagate).
By their vicious attacks on the First Amendment, the MSM, FakeBook, Twitter, and Google have
rivaled the Lobby. Or perhaps they are, in reality, an extension of the Lobby.
It took your self righteous Yankee retards four long bloody years and eight successive
commanders to defeat the "Lazy Southrons". Despite having a GDP five times as large and nearly
twenty times the amount of military age males lol
All the while devastating the homes, towns and cities of the people in the South.
This next time around, you will get a taste of war and hate, Mr Corvinus.
Of course, I doubt a pussy ass bitch like you will stand and fight.
@Muaddib synonymous with abolishing social standards. We see the poisonous fruits of giving
everybody respect rather than on conduct: an inability to use force in the face of rioting and
looting instead focusing on people who call others harsh names, rewarding family breakdown,
government debt, women screaming in the streets through bullhorns demanding that other people
pay for their fornication, an unwillingness to condemn homosexuals for deliberately spreading
AIDS for fear of being homophobic.
I will tell you something. If somehow all immigrants and minorities were kicked out, you
would still be unhappy.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- –
Its a good place to start
Robert Putnam said in his book Bowling Alone that the more diverse a society, the less trust
there is between people. He also found that in diverse communities, even whites distrust other
whites, which makes them even more alienated, because the immigrants at least form their own
ethnic communities. This is what is happening now in all Western countries. Whites are
increasingly alienated in their own countries and societies due to over immigration, leading to
depravity, depression and suicide. It's why birthrate is so low in Western European countries.
It's also why immigration must stop, not just to bring back homogeneity and kinship, but to
reduce the population so each life means more.
Again, you're asking gimme dat while oblivious to the fundamentals. Social programs aren't
payed for by the government the government doesn't make profits, it spends other peoples money
which it collects at gun point . In order to satisfy you thirst for privileges the
government has to literally rob someone else at gun point. Don't people have the right not to be
robbed? Again, only criminals think the "right" to rob is more important than the right not to
be. Moreover, the "good social programs" now stand at $185 Trillion of debt and other
liabilities. Do you know what that number means? Nothing "good" about it. annamaria , says:
November 13, 2020 at 3:23 am GMT • 16.7 hours ago
@Muaddib MSM? The dimwit wokes who avoid like a plague any discussion on Obama/Clinton's
'humanitarian interventions' in faraway countries, which resulted in a multitude of dead
civilians, many of them children.
Biden is ready to intensify the illegal war against Syria (why his progeny has not joined
the 'moderate terrorists' White Helmets is a mystery, don't you think so?). The old corrupted
opportunist would begin a hot war with Russia without understanding what he is doing.
Sure, the MIC has been terribly unhappy with Trump -- not much of 'humanitarian
interventions' during the last four years.
I suggest adjusting the author's arguments to recognise the actual fundamental issue in
play, which is not skin colour or race or language, but CULTURE.
Culture is everything! Culture determines how you treat your neighbor.
Hmm -- the average black in Mississippi has more Euro white Christian culture in him, then
the average white in NY City. Hence NYC's dysfunction.
Anti-Christian Jews are responsible for black disfunction in NYC – period!
@Muaddib -- are you a whiny liberal of lgbtq variety, demanding a special bathroom and
denouncing white privilege a la hypocritical Meghan Markle (and her ridiculous duke 'just
harry'), or you used to be a 'conservative' but it was too boring for you? You know, family
responsibilities, decent education, work ethics
California is the most liberal state in the US. But for some reason, Californias have been
fleeing California like crazy. And you know what, the happy Liberal Californians have been
fleeing to conservative states, without being invited. Last year, "the negative migration was
the 9th year in a row for California."
Ron Unz allows a base, boring, bitter troglodyte like you to post your rude and insulting
garbage on HIS site where he accepts no advertising and runs out of his own pocket so all
viewpoints can be discussed with a light hand and open mind.
I agree with the article but this election isn't actually over outside of the CNN
newsroom.
If the powers that be want to weaken the right they will give Trump his (obvious) win but
only after deluding democrats into thinking that they won the election. I think we are
watching that play out right now.
@Muaddib Some of the 'immigrants' were from the Soviet Union where they received a
fantastic education for nothing. The development of the Internet was conducted under the
watchful eye of intelligence services; the involved have profited handsomely on the enterprise.
Long before the 'immigrants' and their handlers made the killing, there were brilliant people
like Ada Lovelace, Turing, and others who have prepared the ground for modern information
technology.
Today, the woke profiteers ('liberals') at FakeBook and Google religiously follow the diktat
of the CIA/FBI that serve war profiteers and financial Squid. These 'liberals' have been
betraying the interests of human society at large.
@christine what is now North America wanted to stay in the stone age. They live in houses
and drive cars. If whites had never came to what is now North America the people living here
would still be stone age. It took Europeans over 6000 years to go from the iron age to the
industrial age where we were when we founded the USA. There is no way the natives who were
stone age would have been living modern lives.
Colonization was white people going around the world pulling stone age people into the
modern world. Whites are non whites benefactors and only morons cannot see this.
You are not a good thinker. You should be posting on a cooking or sewing site. Politics is
beyond your ken.
@christine your enemy in a hide bag over a roaring fire and letting them roast to death.
The ant trap: coating your enemy in a sticky resin from trees and restraining them over ant
mounds
The head bury: burying your enemy at low tide and allowing the tide to roll in and drown
them.
The horse pull: tying each arm and leg to four separate horses and letting them go four
separate ways.
But our Anglo Western criminal justice system of the 8th Amendment, bonds, free lawyers ,
probation, counselors and medical care in prison is much more savage.
Karma? The crystal ball it's fuzzy but an image is coming in wait .I see a dung beetle in
your future.
I'm not the one who has made empty threats of violence on a opinion webzine against a
woman (snicker snack). You said, "Nancy, you are definitely the type of Irish I would
have no trouble killing, along with Joe Biden and John Brennan".
Why do you respond to "empty," traitor?
Either the threat was empty or it wasn't.
It certainly wasn't a personal threat.
Looks like a threat against a "type of Irish."
What I see is a cucked, traitorous e-activist misrepresenting a threat to pose as a
chivalrous defender of e-womanhood.
This might not be directly relevant, but let me tell you a story.
The Island of Hispaniola was the site of the only known successful slave revolt in history.
So far, so good. The victors where blacks and whites ('hispanics'). Well, that did not work out
well. The whites ('hispanics') revolted and carved out their own nation, it's called the
Dominican Republic. The blacks were left in their own nation, it's called Haiti. The Dominican
Republic has problems, in particular a very high murder rate, but compared to most of the rest
of the world, is not doing so bad. Haiti is an unspeakable cesspool of poverty and filth.
Of course, the Dominican Republic has a viciously effective border control policy preventing
Haitian blacks from moving in. Why doesn't our corporate press complain about this anti-migrant
xenophobia? Maybe rich Americans like the beaches in the Dominican Republic as they are.
Is that something that could – or should – happen in the Untied States? Probably
not, circumstances are different. But still
Christine: I too have experienced at least one native prior lifetime and my home is almost
exactly halfway between two reservations. Friends. Currently I'm reading a book you would
likely enjoy–perhaps thoroughly: "Listen to the Wind: Speak from the Heart" by Roger
Thunderhands Gilbert, who is Metis and has been very close to both the Apache and Lakota
cultures. Publisher is Divine Arts Media.
Always love the comments here, a great range from bright to not so bright to downright dim.
But no matter who you are I'm sure you'll all agree we went from being Bozos on the bus to
being Dr. Zeke's lab rats.
@James Scott t (which liberals are not) all of the stone age people currently living in
Christendom . ride in cars, use computers and cellphones, travel in jets .have access to the
white man's brilliant technology ..it's like we allowed them to jump into our time machine so
they could fast forward into the future we created.
You could also add that we have the patent on high trust culture based on Christian values
of industriousness, honesty, fairness, and decency ..though much of this is being wrecked by
Jewish multiculturalism.
If not for the subversion of organized Jewry, whites would still have the respect of the
stone age non-whites instead of their hatred and contempt.
However, IMO the author uses language which suggests disdain for black Americans (for
example). If that is an expression of "racism", then it would be in the colloquially "bad"
context.
Black Americans kill, rape and steal in huge disproportion to their numbers. Why should I
not disdain that?
You shouldn't make personal statements about people you don't know.
He put himself and his views out there, as any author does, and this is a Comment Board. I
made my comments and observations. Are you new to venues like this? That's how they work
@Muaddib onestly about their failures? They don't support it. In fact they despise free
speech.
Social programs can be good for society. Think not just social security, but also
healthcare for all.
Social programs can be good for society. But liberalism is not about finding good programs.
It is about trying to denigrate and demoralize White people in an attempt at creating equality.
Most liberals are White but they see themselves as the "good Whites" and all other Whites must
be taken down. Liberals are nihilistic egalitarians. They will do anything for equality. They
would sacrifice our children just for some fleeting feeling of equality that doesn't exist.
@Muaddib ily life but in your mind all progress is held back by those other Whites .
I saw that all the time. Urban Whites get "celebrate diversity" bumper stickers and then hang
out with Whites 99% of the time.
More inventions came from WW2 than any other period and Whites on both sides during that
time would think that today's urban egalitarian Whites are total morons.
P.S. your women aren't sexually attracted to you if that wasn't obvious by how they boss you
guys around.
I lived around urban Whites for years. What a soulless and pathetic existence the typical
urban White male lives. The homeless Blacks seem happier than you guys.
The father of Jonathan Miller's mother wanted to emigrate to the USA but got off in Ireland
instead, when it was under British rule. Miller gave an account of this during an interview. I
can't recall whether his grandfather got off in Cork by mistake or whether the person who
arranged his ticket cheated him and others by putting them on a boat to Ireland rather than New
York. For Miller this was an amusing anecdote he told on TV.
At any rate the mother of Jonathan Miller was one of the relatively few Jews living in Ireland,
although Miller himself was born in England.
You've never been around any American Indians or their national autonomous homelands aka
rezess have you? As a group, they're probably the most contented of all definable American race
and ethnic groups. At least they're not endlessly bitching whining and kvetching like the rest
of us.
You should spend a year driving around their rezess and talking to them. Try to fit in as a
tourist or something. Don't be rude and just inform them you're some kind of social scientist
studying their exotic oppressed abused soon to be genocided tribe. Don't insult them. Be
polite. They are regular people just like the rest of us.
We weren't Americans and America wasn't America when the Africans were brought over. We were
English citizens subjects living in separate English colonies known as Massachusetts
Connecticut Virginia Maryland etc.
If only the vile white northern Euro invading scum had come with pipes of peace instead of
guns and i find it poetic justice how guns and more guns and yet more guns are the scariest
part of modern central North America.
May the spirits of those that suffered genocide and holocaust at the hands of gun wielding
invading Northern Europeans be smiling from ear to ear at todays United Gun States of
America.
They are the nut-cases who stick themselves full of needles and pins , and dye their hair
blue so as to present their deranged worldview for all to see.
You forgot the utterly worthless dye disfigurement known as tattoos. All this probably has
roots related to the mutilation known as circumcision as well.
@tomo
Talk to them about Louis Farrakhan. He has the Nation of Islam ( https://www.noi.org/ ] eating out of his hand. The videos are out
there.
Louis names the Jew without disaster resulting. Tell them about The Secret Relationship
Between Blacks and Jews, a splendid book, available from Amazon – at a price or direct
from the https://www.noi.org/final-call-news/
@Peter Frost e US along with the breakdown of the family, loss of the work ethic, a rampant
sneering at honesty, and almost total lack of basic civility. One of my sisters attributes a
lot of that to the effects of casting infants into daycare where it's "dog eat dog" from the
beginning and which I believe is reinforced by years of exposure to the sinecure and benny
seeking bureaucrats in the baby sitting and brainwashing institutions known as schools.
We have ourselves to blame for our choices both as individuals and as a society and we can
whine all we want about blacks and others, but in the end we're paying for our worship and
pursuit of "cool," or self absorption, or whatever.
No, I agree -- a purely "racial" response should not be tried. It will lead to
failure (which is not to say that things like race, culture, values, beliefs etc are not
important)
I suggest you also do a search on the infamous Jew, Aaron Lopez, and work out why he chose a
Spanish name to hide behind rather than an Anglo-Saxon name.
The large majority of TrumpBoomers are screaming at the sky right now with this fraud cope,
because it is inconceivable that a wave of brown, angry youth and affluent whites like myself
have eclipsed them as a voting bloc. The white working class has been melting down worse than
the 2016 SJW trannies for a week now.
Yes of course i would be polite and come in peace and i would make sure not to point a rifle
or pistol at them and start shooting them and then start raping their women and children and i
wouldn't slaughter any livestock that they may have to try and starve them because what decent
white Northern European would do that in central North America anyway?.
If i came in peace and harmony like this they would naturally be far more likely to respond
in kind and share with me what they may know about nature/god, just like what their wonderful
ancestors learnt about from their use of plant medicines/entheogens/sacraments like the Peyote
cactus for example that was used by the Apache Comanche and Kiowa tribes but if i was pure evil
and slaughtered them then of course i wouldn't get to learn from their wisdom and i would
deserve to remain in complete darkness (spiritually speaking) just like most everyone alive is
in the U.S today.
His daughter, Miller's father, became a well-known novelist in Ireland.
Who is the subject in this sentence? Was it someone's daughter or Miller's father who became
a well-known novelist in Ireland? The structure of your sentence makes it unclear.
As I said originally, that doesn't automatically make the author a "racist" in the "bad"
sense, but the suggestion is implicitly there for anyone who wants to make it.
Maybe the author is being emphatically practical in his analysis. FWIW in the past
Australian experience, cohesive immigrant populations have taken at least a couple of
generations to fully naturalise in Australian society. And there does seem to be a lot of
cultural clashing going on in the USA. So maybe a coarse exclusionary approach to reclaiming
power for the American people is the shortest path to a solution (albeit with potential for
collateral damage).
Or maybe one has to read between the lines to get the full sense of what the author is
trying to say.
@christine igners; and this spirit of wear, principle of any cowardice, is so natural in
their hearts, that it is the continual object of the figures that they employ in the species of
eloquence which is proper for them. Their glory is to put at fire and blood the small villages
they can seize. They cut the throat of the old men and the children; they hold only the girls
nubiles; they assassinate their Masters when they are slaves; they can never forgive when they
are victorious: they are enemy of the human mankind. No courtesy, no science, no art improved
in any time, in this atrocious nation. -- Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs (1756) Tome 2,
page 83
Was it EVER possible to pronounce Mitt Romney's and John McCain's names without gagging?
News to me
Also I disagree with the main premise that can be expressed in the ironic Russian saying:
"They are fucking us, and yet we are just getting stronger". Unfortunately it doesn't work like
that. Success begets success, failure begets failure. With the machinery of state in the
DemocRATs' hands, will they really allow their enemies to take back the levers of power? Last
time was a fluke because Hurricane Donald had caught them by surprise.
@Rogue ck of critique of their own past, lack of any sort of conciliatory moves towards
past victims, dooms them.
And this when the entire world rejects globohomo (and usury) with disgust. They have all
sorts of potential allies a home and abroad, and do not use them. Having lived in the Detroit
area for decades, for example, I can tell you that local Muslims are ready-made allies. They
are hardly the only ones. Count any working Latino and all people of Asian descent in this
group, as well as all people of Eastern European descent. They even have allies among working
blacks for christ sake. You are in the fight of your lives, and you don't even think about
allies.
I would say productive non-executive suite Whites are the new slaves in the Waspy-Jewy Anglo
world. But Brazil isn't that far behind either with all of its Sherwin-Williams color sample
shade cards being used in its own affirmative action programs.
Unlike the profitable fables of holobiz, the Jewish rabid hatred towards Palestinians and
the destruction of Palestinian lives is true. Thievery, sadism, torture of teenagers in Israeli
prisons, desecration of Palestinian cemeteries, the intentional handicapping of Palestinian
children Are you ready to talk about the Jeiwsh State's crimes against humanity, committed in
the context of international law? (The US and Israel 'are joined at the hip' according to US
Congresspeople). If not, then your 'righteous' diatribes are cheap.
And don't forget to check the amazing results of the Obama/Clinton's color revlution in
Ukraine.
@Truth irst son of a bitch who was foolish enough to bring over the African for cheap labor
( yes, the African did receive a wage in food, shelter and medical care), these fools using
Mexicans for dirt cheap labor are ruining this nation because of greed and the love of money.
That poor beaner busting his ass for 12 bucks an hour? Don't worry about him folks, he's living
large because he's more than likely being paid cash or he's gaming the system and receiving all
kinds of freebies along with a regular paycheck. I drive by a chicken processing plant daily
that employs nothing but our friends from south of the border and I see some damn fine trucks
and other nice looking vehicles.
The white working class has been melting down worse than the 2016 SJW trannies for a week
now.
Is that right? So why were there no massive chimpouts and looting? Why was it not necessary
to board up the stores, as it would have been had not the ZOG stolen the election?
Stupidly, I think Trump tried to win over the corporate elite, Big Tech, Big Ag, etc.. Maybe
bad advice from his son-in-law? Didn't listen to his intuition? Who knows.
If he is reelected, he will not make the same mistake twice. I think they know this too.
@christine ringing a force of about five or six to one against his enemy; kills helpless
women and little children, and massacres th e men in their beds; and then brags about it as
long as he lives, and his son and his grandson and great-grandson after him glorify it among
the "heroic deeds of their ancestors."
If you came in peace, do you think the Stone Age Siberians would have also shared their vast
knowledge about the Wheel? Or metal smelting? Or writing and math?
People like (((Christine))) always bring up atrocities committed against Indians and they
make some valid points, HOWEVER, as we saw, (((Christine))) had nothing to say about Whites
being butchered by racist Black homicidal maniacs in South Africa nor did she address the
Holodomor. This leads me to believe that (((Christine))) the self proclaimed "Irish" lass is
more than likely just a (((troll.)))
And of course, people like (((Christine))) don't talk about so-called Jews stealing the
Palestinians land and brutalizing Palestinians, instead they focus on ANCIENT HISTORY. And
these people will never talk about Black guys executing little white boys or Black guys
snatching a little white boy from his white mother and throwing the kid off a balcony. Or how
about when a black woman kidnapped a white boy in Texas and burned him to death with a
blowtorch. Oh, yeah, lets focus on ancient history, which unless you lived back then no one
really knows what the damn truth was, we know we certainly can't rely on (((historians))) or
mainstream (((history books.))) Unless things change, 100 years from now, people will be
reading about how 3 Black women sent America to the moon.
Obvious LIES that will be told or have been told
6 million Jews were gassed in concentration camps during WWII
Germany started WWII
the official 9-11 narrative
Osama Bin Laden was killed * that dude probably was dead years before he was claimed to have
been killed, the guy was in poor health.
James Earl Ray did not kill MLK * the dude said so on his death bed, why would you still
keep holding on to the same story if you were going to die anyhow?
And when it comes to Presidential elections.
JFK didn't beat Nixon
Dubya didn't beat Gore
And Joe Biden sure as hell didn't beat Trump, hell I would admit that if I hated Trump's guts.
Don't like Gore, voted for that sorry sack of shit, Dubya, but no way in hell, Gore lost.
Some more code words we can start using ((( ))) for are (((SJW))) or (((military industrial
complex.)))
@Ultrafart the Brave people too, patriotic or otherwise. White nationalism is a political
stance, of course it will exclude people who are not white nationalists, duh!
Indeed, one bad thing leads to another. Once the dynamics are set in train, it will take
generations to unravel (if ever).
What "bad thing" lead to blacks people committing heinous amounts of murder, robbery and
rape? Slavery? Colonialism? Affirmative Action? Must be something whites did, right?
As I said originally, that doesn't automatically make the author a "racist" in the "bad"
sense.
You have not explained what's bad about racism. And what are those quotation marks for?
You've never been around any American Indians or their national autonomous homelands aka
rezess have you? As a group, they're probably the most contented of all definable American
race and ethnic groups. At least they're not endlessly bitching whining and kvetching like
the rest of us.
Aldey, having lived in the most Indian state in America for the last 17 years, I can assure
you that that is patently ridiculous.
Some things never change. As Mark Twain wrote in his Essay about The Noble Red Man;
He is ignoble–base and treacherous, and hateful in every way. Not even imminent
death can startle him into a spasm of virtue .
With that Twain appears slightly ahead of his time. He could have just as accurately been
describing other "Reds," such as the Bolsheviks and their supporters most of whom could have
taught the Indians a thing or two about terror and torture especially the mass varieties.
I drive by a chicken processing plant daily that employs nothing but our friends from
south of the border and I see some damn fine trucks and other nice looking vehicles.
Whites are storming ballot counting centers instead of looting their own businesses. Whites
routinely chimp out, they just pick different targets. Look at the devastation around Hockey
arenas when teams win the Stanley Cup.
As far as the election being stolen, well, you sound like a crazed conspiracy nutter.
They are ALWAYS hiring, breh. Maybe you can tell some of da homies. But I doubt da homies
could cut the mustard. I worked with tons of Mexicans and El Salvadorans and I can tell you
from experience they really look down on lazy negroes. My gawd, some of the things I heard
these Brown folks say about Black folks had me blushing crimson. I went from Donald Trump
orange to the color of my favorite soda, cherry red. Cue: You Can't Always Get What You Want by
Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stoooooooooones.
The Second Guy: Kamala Harris' husband, Douglas Emhoff, is Jewish; he will not only be the
"second gentleman" (caveat: No one has settled on a term for the job), he will be the first
Jewish second spouse. Emhoff has been vocal about his Jewish identity, and it will be
interesting to see how that plays out in a role that has been used to advance education
initiatives.
Yet, there do remain groupings of well-rooted people who are able to cope with a clinically
insane "white" culture which surrounds them physically and throughout most electronic mediums.
Their struggle is huge, yet they persist in reconnecting with traditional tribal values, with
powwows, drumming fests and even -- gradually -- re-learning their indigenous languages.
There are still waaaay too many European-descended people in my area who retain an ignorant
, discriminatory and even prejudicial attitude towards these, our neighbors and in some cases,
potential teachers. But those who reach out do tend to reach those who also reach out. So hope
remains.
HATER -- perhaps not without some viable personal reason/s, but nevertheless one incapable
of discriminating between individuals and devolved into rank prejudice.
I spent time on the other side of the wall early seventies, and I will never forget the dead
eyes of the oppressed citizenry and the morgue-like atmosphere of the grey cities, and these
lunatic Democrats are now pushing to create such a scenario in the US
Excellent article and explanation of procedure, Mr. Redmayne-Titley. On Tucker Carlson's
show about six weeks ago, Tucker had on guest Darren Beattie to describe the specific type of
color revolution that the Democrat Party appeared to be planning to proceed ahead with to
usurp this election:
Tucker's show tonight will be as clear as could be as to which Tucker he is going to be
selling to his huge audience: independent journalist or Fox News/DS apparatchik. I will be
watching and hope that he will continue to be the voice of much of the people, though his
letting up on the Hunter Biden story was troubling to say the least.
Even with Pennsylvania and Georgia, the 2 most likely to flip imo, trump would still lose,
unless he miraculously flips Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, or Michigan.
The fix was in no doubt and trump won all those states fairly, but its a tall order and
I'm skeptical that trump can pull it off.
Thanks to the Trumpet, the CIA/FBI/NSA, etc., have now been able to clearly identidy the
sections of the populace that feel their pure whiteness is being victimised,
Were you in a coma for a number of years? For 20 years, starting with William Binney
through Edward Snowdon and Dave Montgomery, there have been warnings that the alphabet
agencies have been illegally spying the US citizens. Montgomery pointed out they spied on
Trump before he became a candidate.
The Trumpian corporate party's biggest sin was trying to get in on the Republocrat –
Demican Uni-party corporate party action.
Never gonna happen.
I believe that US are truthful when they talk about "free" elections. Theoretically, the
only way you can get something "free" in life is – if you steal it, or if somebody
gives you something as a gift. This "election" has fulfilled both of these 2 criteria. First
the deep state stole the election from Trump and then they presented it as a gift to Biden.
So it's all good. It was a free election for Biden, Trump got robbed – but hey, you
can't please everybody.
Karma's a biatch. All those color revolutions in Ukraine, Venezuela, Iran, Hong Kong,
propped up in one way or another by Mike Pompeo when he was head of CIA continuing into
Secretary of State, is now coming back to haunt Trump. Good job appointing that fat fuck.
If Trump loses, it would be his own doing in some ways. He has failed to roll back legal
immigration esp. H1B/OPT until a month before the election, and spent most of his time
catering to the Zionist filth with all the nauseating sycophantic overt pandering to Israel
and the Wall Street Jews. Wormtongue's pandering to the blacks by letting all the drug
dealers out of jail is backfiring big time too. 92% of blacks still voted for Biden so fuck
you Kushner.
If Trump somehow survives this and actually comes back to win, I hope he learned from his
mistake in the first term. Instead of spending all 4 years pandering to Jews and blacks who
didn't vote for him, spend his time taking care of those who did vote for him, his white
voting base, and we want an end to H1B, OPT, EB5, L1, illegal immigration. No more green
cards for the next 40 years! Begin mass deportation. Most importantly, fire Pompeo and
Javanka!
Many thanks, Mr. Redmayne, for this overview-cum-dissection of the recount scenarios.
That all of these counting-stopping orders took place in swing states defies
credulity.
Surely poll workers were being paid to continue counting throughout the night. Not to go home
and catch 40 winks. Lord knows we have plenty of night-time workers in this 24/7 country.
It is ironic that in the context of the USA's overseas military disasters, the common
advice when the home team is obviously getting pounded has been "Just declare yourself the
winner" and get the hell out.
Seems like the Dems are using this playbook and hoping they can create a new reality by
declaring it so.
The spectacle of Joe Biden calling for "unity" after the shitshow following 2016 is
rich.
I doubt that this richness is going to be lost on the "losers" in this election.
The country is very n eatly divided between blue urban and red countryside. I would not
county on "unity" rearing its head anywhere in redland.
The only people loyal to Trump is the working class. No one else gives a damn whether he
lives or dies, including the vast majority of Republican officials and office holders
concerned only with keeping what they have.
Yes, the disgusting PC CBC reporters display their contempt for Trump at every turn, and
are complicit in obscuring Democrat misdeeds, whether by uncritically parroting the Maddow
ravings on Russiagate or ignoring the influence peddling of Dems from Biden to HRC. CBC
reporters are repeatedly characterizing charges of election fraud as groundless. Clearly they
are unaware of Pelosi's admission of how the public is misinformed, with her description of
'leaking' fabricated allegations to MSM insiders, then using the subsequent MSM reports as
'evidence' of veracity.
@GMC ciders). The not-so-youthful Obamas the Fraud and the badly aged Clintons have been
liberally using revolutionary rhetoric a la Che Gevara, never mind that the Obamas and
Clintons are major war criminals guilty of the mass slaughter of civilian populations
(including the multitude of children) in the brown countries of Syria and Lybia and non-brown
countries of former Yugoslavia and Ukraine. They, Obamas and Clintons, are murderers,
cannibals. Yet for the 'progressive' wokes, the history of the US is not known and is not
interesting for knowing. The wokes like the keto diet, mild psychedelics, cool outfit, and a
special set of words, including 'solidarity, social awareness, political correctness,
LGBTQIA' and such to stroke gently their, wokes,' egos. The aroma of rot is in the air.
@The Alarmist ake-sure-trump-supporters-receive-accountability
Emily Abrams can not forgive Trump for being so ineffective in the Middle East. Unlike the
Obama/Clinton administration, Trump has not started a new War for Israel. And for this, Trump
and "anyone who took a paycheck to help Trump" must be punished.
Meanwhile, the reality is hitting up:
After Attorney General Bill Barr authorized federal prosecutors to pursue "substantial
allegations" of irregularities in the 2020 presidential election, the head of the DOJ's
Election Crimes Branch [Richard Pilger] has decided to resign.
Vote fraud is as American as apple pie. Just remember how JFK and George W. Bush manged to
sneak into the White House. America has always bee a banana republic, now it has just become
more evident.
BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Analysis of Election Night Data from All States Shows MILLIONS OF
VOTES Either Switched from President Trump to Biden or Were Lost -- Using Dominion and Other
Systems By
Joe Hoft
Published November 10, 2020 at 6:32pm
2080 Comments ,
BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Analysis of Election Night Data from All States Shows
MILLIONS OF VOTES Either Switched from President Trump to Biden or Were Lost -- Using Dominion
and Other Systems By
Joe Hoft
Published November 10, 2020 at 6:32pm
2080 Comments ,
BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Analysis of Election Night Data from All States Shows
MILLIONS OF VOTES Either Switched from President Trump to Biden or Were Lost -- Using Dominion
and Other Systems By
Joe Hoft
Published November 10, 2020 at 6:32pm
2080 Comments ,
So despite the help from the massive software "glitch", Biden fraud machine had to dump
late night dump ballots all for Biden only in a hurry. How bad did he lose? It almost looks
like most of his votes are fabricated. I would not be surprised if he were 20 points behind
in legal votes.
I think the ballot dumping was the side show to keep us from finding out about the vote
switching and deleting. How can this be verified, and how can this be seen on the machines
now?
Badass American of Indian decent (actually was born in India I believe but family came
here legally when a young child). Ran for senate in Massachusetts as a Republican and was/is
a big Trump supporter. Blew the doors off the Covid 19 scam, not that it wasn't real but how
it was being treated and handled by MSM and the Socialist Democratic Party, ie, by those who
hyped the whole thing.
EventBrite just told everyone that "March for Trump" was cancelled. It is NOT
Cancelled.
The Elites / Big-Tech / MSM (including Fox) are TERRIFIED We Will Show Up - doing everything
possible to shut us down.
Don't let them. Break their Narrative.
Get to DC or the nearest contested state-house This Weekend, or we hand Biden the WH.
CORRECTION!! We hand the WH to Kamala, the most leftist (socialist) senator in the Senate!
She falls right in line with Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro, Fidel,Stalin and other
(in)famous dictators politically. If you are a veteran, have a CFL, have made a firearms
purchase from a dealer, etc. - your personal information WILL be found and used to confiscate
your arms if these socialists gain enough power. They have already stated that they will
rejoin the 'climate accords,' restart 'fair trade' with China, move our embassy out of
Jerusalem, restart nuclear 'cooperation' with N. Korea, pass 'common sense' gun laws to
protect our citizens (never mind the THOUSANDS of gun laws now on the books that are NOT
ENFORCED,) tear down 'Orange Man Bads' border fence, open up our borders to all comers, and
amnesty all illegals now in the nation - and that's just for a start.
You are so right ....but the Marxists better ask the British what happened when General
Gage sent British regulars to DISARM AMERICANS at CONCORD . THAT is when the Revolutionary
War turned into a REAL SHOOTING WAR .
Avoidance of War is Not Peace. While I am praying for Honest Election Results that = Trump
Victory, the NWO Deep State must be stopped Now.
Marxist democRats and Quisling repubs are Bought and Paid for by their NWO Oligarch
Masters.
Never Submit, Never Surrender.
If they mean to have CW, then let it begin with this Coup if it is accomplished in Jan of
21
He also doesn't believe AIDS is caused by HIV... really?! And that we should expand the
USPS by having them set up and regulate a national email service. Broken clock, twice-a-day,
etc.
H.I.V was found to be nothing more than Biologically Inactive Gunk by Nobel Laureate
Professor and Cancer specialist Doctor Peter Duesberg and his work was backed up by Nobel
Laureate Doctor Carey Mullin. The H.I.V hypothesis proposed by the Fraudulent Doctors Gallo
and Anthony Fao-Chi[ yes! That Fao-chi] never passed the Koch Postulates, so they turned to
the MSM to pressure the Reagan administration into acceptance of their Hypothesis and that is
the most important part of the H.I.V Hypothesis...
Yesterday on hannity's radio show, John Solomon was severely downplaying the software
problems. Never trusted that guy. Does anyone ever say, "hey, you have to check out Just the
News?!". NOPE.
John Solomon was an integral part of uncovering the SpyGate scandal. Just because he says
something you disagree with does NOT make him a partisan hack.. He's one of the last
investigative reporters left in the U.S.
He speaks the truth and the truth is that as of now we have zero evidence of wrongdoing
other than hearsay. "Data passed around" analyzed by some guy does not cut the mustard in
court. Actual proof is needed and as of now we are just spouting BS. I am not delusional as
most of you and understand that as we sit we are losing big time. He does not say everything
I need to hear......WAAAAAAAA.
I don't really trust him after watching him on Lou Dobbs A LOT. He squirms out of tough
questions. I agree about the investigation into obamagate with Sara Carter. Why is he now
putting a liberal (UNTRUE) spin on the software problems?
No spin, Just the truth. The evidence as of now would get thrown out of court as it is
hearsay. Get the data looked at by a real analytics team not some random guy sitting in his
basement.
He ran hard against Pocahontas up here in MA. Brilliant man! Someone had to step up with
indisputable proof and stop this charade now! OT: Watched a bit of Tucker Carlson
tonight...the bosses got to him. He's talking about senile Biden's virus response. No Tucker,
President Trump is in charge.
I agree! Tucker was singing the praises of FNC several nights ago about their truth
telling...what garbage! Tucker can go too with FNC, I'm done with them!
I read an email on the laptop from Tucker to Hunter the day after he said that on his
show. It was just thanking Hunter for writing a letter of recommendation to Georgetown for
someone. Nothing bad, but Tucker would not touch the photos on the laptop of incest with
underage family members.
@shylockcracy Solmeimani, he hasn't started any shooting wars. Sanctions are undeclared
wars, and Trump's sanctions help US corporations, most of which are globalist anyway. Same
shit different pile.
The last US Presidents who were mildly anti-Zionist were turfed out of office and
assassinated. All of the branches of the USG are (((occupied territory))) and have been for
decades, as was noted by George Wallace in the 1960s.
Trump's redeeming qualities are few and far between, but getting out of "free trade" deals
and reduced immigration, whether legal or illegal, are a big finger in the eye of the
globalists. Other than that, it appears as if he is the only one serious about cleaning up
vote fraud. If the Demicans are caught out, they will shut down the Republocrats fixing in
retaliation, until a new scam is figured out.
"... ...BIDEN, SPEAKING DURING SECOND PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: Within 100 days, I'm going to send to the United States Congress a pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented people. And all of those so-called dreamers, those DACA kids, they're going to be immediately certified again to be able to stay in this country and put on a path to citizenship. ..."
This is a corporate takeover of the country. Joe Biden's transition advisers include
executives from Uber, Visa, Capital One, Airbnb, Amazon, the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation and the
nonprofit run by Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Are you surprised? No, you're not.
...According to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal, at least 40 members of the Biden
transition team announced earlier this week either were or are registered lobbyists. You won't
be shocked to learn that the government of China looks on at all this and is highly pleased. A
weak, divided America obsessed with narcissistic identity politics is good for them and very
different from them.
... Joe Biden has announced that as president he will not deport a single illegal alien from
this country in his first 100 days. It doesn't matter who they are, it doesn't matter what
they've done. It doesn't matter whether they were convicted of crimes such as rape and murder
or not. Literally, they can all stay here.
This is great news if you're Silicon Valley. The tech companies wanted this because they
rely on cheap labor. But for the rest of us, what's the upside exactly? By the way, if you live
anywhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, good luck to you. Also, don't bother locking your doors
or pining for a border wall or thinking that immigration restrictions might improve your
life.
...BIDEN, SPEAKING DURING SECOND PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: Within 100 days, I'm going to send
to the United States Congress a pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented people.
And all of those so-called dreamers, those DACA kids, they're going to be immediately certified
again to be able to stay in this country and put on a path to citizenship.
TUCKER CARLSON PROVIDES COMPLETE TOTAL PROOF OF WIDESPREAD DEMOCRAT VOTE FRAUD THAT STOLE
THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Paul Craig Roberts
Tucker Carlson is the ONLY honest media figure in the United States. No wonder the
presstitutes want him arrested. I am concerned that the criminal Hillary DNC will have him
assassinated. You are simply not permitted to tell the truth in the United States. To tell the
truth in the American media is a capital offense.
This had to be posted on Parler because Twitter, FaceBook, and YouTube will not permit the
Fox News report on Vote Theft to be posted. What more evidence do you need that there is a
conspiracy to steal the presidential election from Trump? If the treasonous and criminal
Democrats get away with their coup against democracy, the United States is finished as a
country. No Trump voter will ever again think of the US as his/her country.
As a Norwegian I can say with some authority that I know what the word "Quisling" means, and
Stoltenberg is following in that "proud" tradition. He is a puppet and collaborator of the
worst kind.
For those who don't know, Quisling was a member of the Norwegian pre-war government in the
1930's. When the German Nazis arrived in the morning of April 9, 1940 and the government and
King escaped northwards, Quisling performed a Coup d'Etat by going on state radio and
declared himself "Minister President", and collaborated with the Nazi occupation forces.
Everybody knew the meaning of the word "Quisling", even the Germans. The story goes that
during the occupation, in one of the illegal resistance pamphlets there was a cartoon showing
Herr Quisling going to Victoria Terasse (Nazi headquarters in Oslo) to visit Josef Terboven
(German Reichskommissar for Norway):
Quisling arrives at the gate and says to the German guard: "I am Quisling"
The guard replies: "And your name please?"
Apparently disregarding Facebook's public-facing image as a fierce opponent of election
meddling by entities not legitimately involved in the political process, Zuckerberg dived into
the fray during a Thursday company-wide town hall, according to an audio of the meeting first
obtained by
Buzzfeed and later confirmed by
CNBC .
"I believe the outcome of the election is now clear and Joe Biden is going to be our next
president," Zuckerberg reportedly told the assembled crowd. "It's important that people
have confidence that the election was fundamentally fair, and that goes for the tens of
millions of people that voted for Trump."
"... Nunes, the panel's top Republican, repeatedly made that claim on Lou Dobbs' Fox Business program last month, while alleging that the "intelligence services in this country have been corrupted by the Democratic national party and their propaganda arm in the media." ..."
As President Donald Trump
and his allies continue to publicly dispute the outcome of the election, they are also quietly
seeking to discredit the Russia investigation that has cast a dark cloud over the
administration for more than four years.
Those concerns roared back this week in the wake of a flurry of personnel changes at the
National Security Agency -- and the Pentagon -- as Trump installed political loyalists in key
positions where they could help turn the tide in the behind-the-scenes battle over
declassifying documents, which has raged for weeks.
Trump believes the documents in question will undermine the intelligence community's
unanimous finding that Russia interfered in the 2016 race to help him win, by exposing
so-called "deep state" plots against his campaign and transition during the Obama
administration, according to multiple current and former officials.
But CIA and National Security Agency career officials have
strenuously objected to releasing certain information from the Russia interference
assessment, arguing that it would seriously damage sources and methods in a way that the
intelligence community doesn't believe can be easily repaired.
Both agencies have also cited concerns about cherry-picking information to release and the
politicization of their work as they fight against Ratcliffe's recent efforts to satisfy
Trump's promises to declassify thousands of pages of documents.
Multiple sources familiar with the classified materials have downplayed the significance of
these documents, telling CNN the administration won't make political hay by releasing them
despite the President's fixation.
While Ratcliffe and former acting DNI Richard Grenell have sought to declassify documents
related to the Russia probe and Hillary Clinton's emails, CIA Director Gina Haspel and National
Security Agency chief Gen. Paul Nakasone have fought those moves.
Behind the scenes, Haspel has defended the work of career officials who have come under
criticism from Trump and allies over 2016-era intelligence work behind the investigation of
Russian interference in the 2016 US election.
Haspel's job in jeopardy while Trump
elevates loyalists
The standoff has led the President to become increasingly frustrated with Haspel, in
particular, who he blames for delaying the release of these documents despite the fact that he
and Ratcliffe have the authority to declassify the additional intelligence at their own
discretion. At the end of the day, if Trump wanted these documents declassified, he could do it
himself.
A senior administration official and three former administration officials with knowledge of
the situation told CNN they expect the President to fire his CIA director, as he did Defense
Secretary Mark Esper .
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a
Kentucky Republican, have attempted to protect Haspel from Trump's wrath in recent days,
providing public displays of support for the CIA director amid speculation of her possible
ouster.
Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas voiced his support for Haspel in a tweet Tuesday,
saying: "Intelligence should not be partisan. Not about manipulation, it is about preserving
impartial, nonpartisan information necessary to inform policy makers and so the can protect the
US."
The post prompted immediate backlash from the President's son Donald Trump Jr, who called
Haspel a "trained liar."
"Have you or @marcorubio or @senatemajldr actually discussed this with anyone in the Admin.
who actually works with her, like @DNI_Ratcliffe or @MarkMeadows or @robertcobrien, to get
their perspective, or are you just taking a trained liar's word for it on everything?" he
tweeted, tagging McConnell and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who serves as acting
chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
While Haspel's immediate future as CIA director remains uncertain, Trump moved several
political allies into new roles at the Pentagon and National Security Agency this week --
placing them in career positions, which come with civil service protections. They could also
have an immediate impact on the release of classified documents.
Michael Ellis,
an official on the National Security Council , shifted over to the National Security Agency
as legal counsel, which puts him in a civil servant role at an agency at the forefront of the
declassification dispute.
Ellis is widely considered to be a partisan Trump loyalist and has little intelligence
experience despite being elevated to the job of the White House's top national security lawyer
under the President.
He was part of several White House controversies, including overruling career officials over
classified information in the book written by former national security adviser John Bolton.
CNN has previously reported that Ellis came under scrutiny for his alleged roundabout role
in providing information to GOP Rep. Devin Nunes of California, then-chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee, which showed members of Trump's team were included in foreign
surveillance reports collected by US intelligence.
Another former Nunes aide, Kash Patel, will become chief of staff to acting Defense
Secretary Chris Miller, according to an administration official and a US defense official.
The House impeachment inquiry uncovered evidence connecting Patel to the diplomatic back
channel led by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, and the efforts to spread conspiracy theories
about Biden and coerce Ukraine into announcing an investigation of the former vice
president.
A third Trump loyalist with ties to Nunes, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, was also elevated to a senior
role at the Pentagon this week.
Cohen-Watnick gained notoriety in
March 2017 for his alleged involvement with Ellis in providing intelligence materials to
Nunes, who went on to claim that US intelligence officials improperly surveilled Trump
associates.
In his new post as the Pentagon's acting under secretary for intelligence, Cohen-Watnick
could find himself at odds with Nakasone, a military officer, if he pushes for additional
classified materials to be released.
While it remains to be seen if Trump will ultimately fire Haspel, the elevation of officials
like Ellis and Patel has raised concerns that the President is clearing the way to release
documents despite previous objections from intelligence leaders.
"The motives of his recent moves at DoD and NSA remain unclear and are of course
speculative, although the partisan personnel he put in place certainly suggest that he is
stacking the deck, ultimately to win the fight over further declassification of intel related
to the 2016 Russian investigation," Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer who oversaw
operations in Europe and Russia before retiring last summer, told CNN.
"If he did the same at CIA, install a new hyper-partisan director who would agree to further
declassification efforts, it would not only expose and compromise highly classified sources and
methods, but also taint the agency in the eyes of our international partners. Simply put, that
puts America at great risk," he added.
House Republicans leading campaign to declassify
secret documents
Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee have also pushed the narrative that Haspel
is personally preventing certain documents from being released.
Nunes, the panel's top Republican, repeatedly made that claim on Lou Dobbs' Fox Business
program last month, while alleging that the "intelligence services in this country have been
corrupted by the Democratic national party and their propaganda arm in the media."
Some of the additional intelligence Nunes wants released comes from classified documents
based on a report compiled by Republicans on the committee he chaired in 2018, according to a
source familiar with the materials.
The House Republican report on the Russia investigation disputes the intelligence
community's finding that Russia was trying to help Trump in the 2016 campaign, raising issues
about the tradecraft behind the intelligence assessment.
The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, however, confirmed the intelligence
community's assessment in its bipartisan investigation into Russia's 2016 election
interference.
Current and former officials have maintained that if there were something revelatory in the
documents that remain classified, it would have been included in either the unclassified House
or Senate reports and in a way that did not compromise sources and methods.
Yet House Republicans and Trump still believe the information in these secret documents will
help validate their criticism of the CIA and FBI's handling of the probe -- raising more
questions about whether this is just an attempt to cherry-pick intelligence.
Either way, the documents are so sensitive that they remain under lock and key at CIA
headquarters in Langley, according to a source familiar with the matter. House Republicans on
the Intelligence Committee stored the materials in a lockbox, which this source compared to a
gun safe. The lockbox was then placed in a CIA vault -- prompting some officials to
characterize it as a "turducken" or a "safe within a safe." The New York
Times first reported on the "turducken."
Republicans on the House panel have long accused the CIA of blocking access to the documents
and have encouraged Ratcliffe to declassify the materials despite objections by the CIA and the
the National Security Agency, multiple sources told CNN.
In a letter sent to the intelligence community's inspector general last month, Ratcliffe
said he has asked that the documents undergo a formal declassification review at the request of
Nunes but also has asked the watchdog to review whether the 2017 intelligence community
assessment on Russian interference "adhered to proper analytical tradecraft."
At the same time, Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security Committee have accused Haspel
of stonewalling their oversight efforts by refusing to produce CIA documents that were
requested as part of the panel's own review of the Russia probe.
There is claimed proof. (Examples below and part of McENanay's statement). OK, these will
now be followed through. So we will see if they are enough to cause any changes in the final
outcome.
In more news, Twitter censored 12 of trumps Tweets today.
The amount of newcomers trying, rather desperately, to decry anything about the voting
fraud that may have happened is a sign that a bit of "hot-under-the-collar-desperation is
setting in.
The "Intelligence" community is openly calling for a "coup" by VP Pence. They are in the
process of really panicking as many of the originators of Russiagate, Pizzagate would face
real prison terms if Trump wins. (Brennans statements to the Press) (I would love to add
"billsgate" but that would be off topic)
Quote:
"We keep hearing the drumbeat of 'where is the evidence?' Right here, Sean, 234 pages
of sworn affidavits, these are real people, real allegations, signed with notaries,"
McEnany said.
"They're alleging - this is one county, Wayne County, Michigan - they are saying that
there was a batch of ballots where 60 percent had the same signature," she told host Sean
Hannity.
"They're saying that 35 ballots had no voter record but they were counted anyway,
that 50 ballots were run multiple times through a tabulation machine."
The Dem/ Main Stream Media Complex is infuriated that President Donald J. Trump will not
concede the 2020 election. This is a Sign of Contradiction that he is
doing the right thing. This does not yet mean that Trump won enough votes in key states, as
Tucker Carlson has noted, but we also can't say with confidence that Trump lost [ Tucker
Carlson Says There's Not Enough Fraud to Change Election Results, by Jacob
Jarvis, Newsweek, November 10, 2020]. And here appears to be solid evidence that there
was at least some wrongdoing -- far more so than for the Russia Hoax that paralyzed
Trump's Administration for three years. The same neoconservatives who are demanding Trump
concede would be insisting the U.S, invade another country to "bring democracy" if we saw its
government behaving this way. Ultimately, the entire battle is about who is sovereign in this
country -- American citizens or the Dem/ MSM complex, including Big Tech oligarchs. They
ensured it was not a "free and fair" election, and President Trump should never concede.
Let's consider the almost hysterical fury from the MSM telling us that President Trump has a
duty to admit defeat because Biden "won."
In fact, of course President Trump isn't doing anything illegal. No one has won or lost.
Senate Mitch McConnell may be afraid to defy Trump because he doesn't want to lose the two
Senate seats in
Georgia and thus, his status as Majority Leader. But he's absolutely right when he says
that the Electoral College determines the winner and, until that happens, "anyone who is
running for office can exhaust concerns" [ Mitch McConnell says Electoral College will determine 2020 election, by Lisa
Mascaro, Fox6 Milwaukee, November 10, 2020]. The Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore
that settled the 2000 election didn't come to an end until December 12, 2000.
Media outlets "declaring" the winner have no legal significance, especially when their
projections seem to be based on polls that have proven to be inaccurate [ Professional
pollsters blew it again in 2020. Why?b y Matthew Rozsa, Salon, November
4, 2020].
As of this writing, Arizona, Alaska, Pennsylvania, Georgia are all undecided. North Carolina
was just called for Trump
(and underwhelming Chamber of Commerce GOP senator Thom Tills managed to win a narrow victory
over Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham [ Cal
Cunningham concedes to Thom Tills in North Carolina Senate race, by Evie
Fordham, Fox News, November 10, 2020]). Joe Biden's lead in Arizona is narrow and
shrinking dangerously.
President Trump has a strong legal case in the key state of Pennsylvania, where it appears
that the state Supreme Court simply created a new power to count votes that arrived
after election day. The U.S. Supreme Court (without Amy Coney Barrett) deadlocked over
this, but the Trump campaign will almost certainly take this case to SCOTUS again [ Byron
York's Daily Memo: The election lawsuit Trump should win, by Byron York, Washington
Examiner, November 10, 2020]. As Senator Ted Cruz has said, there has thus far not been a
"comprehensive presentation of evidence" [ Ted Cruz: Trump Election Fraud Allegations Will Be Resolved In Court, Not By Persuading You
Or Me, by Tim Hains, RealClearPolitics, November 10, 2020]. Republican
leaders in Pennsylvania have already called for a recount "in any counties where state law was
broken" [ Senate Co-Sponsorship Memoranda, Pennsylvania State Senate, November 6,
2020].
However, there are more fundamental issues at stake. Thanks to the Sem/ MSM complex's
campaign of COVID-19 hysteria, the country engaged in a massive experiment with mail-in voting
[ Are We Sure About All Those Mail-in Ballots, by Josh Hammer, The American
Mind, November 10, 2020]. Different state requirements add to the confusion. There have
been specific claims of outright fraud, notably the inclusion of dead people on the voter
rolls, reports that local officials gave voters instructions that would invalidate their
ballots, and open theft of ballots [ On Electoral Fraud in
2020, by Pedro Gonzalez, American Greatness, November 9, 2020].
Critically, in several of the states where President Trump is launching legal challenges, the
common factor is a company called Dominion Voting Systems. In one proven case, a "glitch" in
its system awarded 6,000 votes to Joe Biden rather than President Trump [ Republicans expand probe into Dominion Voting Systems after Michigan counting snafu, by Zachary Halaschak and Emily Larsen, Washington Examiner, November 8, 2020].
One former Deputy Attorney General for Michigan says counters in Detroit outright provided
fraudulent ballots to non-voters [ Ex-Michigan Deputy Attorney General Alleges Detroit Counters Assigned Fraudulent Ballots To
Non-Voters, by Kyle Olson, Breitbart, November 9, 2020].
The truth or falsity of these claims must be shown in court. Of course, anti-Trump groups
are trying to prevent any legal challenges by individually targeting the law firm that
President Trump is using [ Inside the
Lincoln Project's new campaign targeting Trump's law firm, by Greg Sargent,
Washington Post, November 10, 2020]. No one seems to have considered that such a
strategy ensures that most Trump supporters will -- correctly -- consider a Biden
Administration utterly illegitimate.
Twitter and other social networking oligopolists are currently putting their thumb on the
scale by censoring posts or by claiming there are "election integrity" issues with posts they
dislike, even posts by President Trump himself [ Tucker Carlson: Big Tech Took Part in 'One of the Worst Forms of Election Tampering, by Mary Chastain, Legal Insurrection, November 10, 2020].
This control of information both before and after the election renders democracy pointless.
If Tech oligarchs can control what the voters see and hear, we might as well put them in charge
and dispense with Election Day altogether. It would be simpler and less time consuming than
going through a farce where both the exchange of information before an election and tabulating
of votes on Election Day itself are apparently too much for the world's sole superpower.
If this is the way the system works, then, as President Trump has been claiming for years,
it is "rigged" and illegitimate. If this is how it is going to be, whatever the Regime on the
Potomac says in future should be considered as foreign to the Historic American Nation as
governments based out of Brussels, Moscow, or Beijing.
Indeed, one can't help but wonder whether the historic American nation would fare better
under outright foreign occupation than a hostile elite which considers itself our rulers and
treats us with open contempt, if not hatred.
President Trump and outraged Republicans do have a card to play even if all the legal
challenges fail. State legislatures must certify a state's electors before the College can vote
for the next president. If state delegations believe the vote has been corrupted, they can send
their own competing slate of electors [ Donald
Trump's Stealthy Road to Victory, by Graham Allison, National Interest,
November 6, 2020].
President Trump also has powers that he can use to change the political environment,
especially by destroying hostile institutions and declassifying documents that the Deep State
really doesn't want to be made public [ Reflections on the late
election, by Curtis Yarvin, Gray Mirror, November 8, 2020].
If a rigged system is going to take President Trump down, he can take it down with him.
Arguably, if President Trump had the will to do something like that, he would not be in this
mess. He did not bring Big Tech to heel. He did not ensure that the bureaucracy was filled with
people loyal to him. He kept hiring people who were his enemies and then acted surprised when
he was rewarded with treachery. He governed like a conventional Republican while talking like a
nationalist, the worst of both worlds [ The Tragedy of Trump, by Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, November 16, 2018].
Nonetheless, with his back to the wall, Trump can and should fight. Even now, he has a
popular movement behind him -- all he needs to do is lead them against the System that they
thought they had defeated in 2016.
The reason I want to see Trump win is to see if anyone like Brennan or Comey end up in
jail. If not then it's proof this is all smoke and mirrors on behalf of the usual
suspects.
A new issue has turned up in Pennsylvania putting another 100,000+ ballots in line for
exclusion: (1)
Over 51,000 ballots were marked as returned just a day after they were sent out -- an
extraordinary speed, given U.S. Postal Service (USPS) delivery times, while nearly 35,000
were returned on the same day they were mailed out. Another more than 23,000 have a return
date earlier than the sent date. More than 9,000 have no sent date.
"Since October 1, the average time of delivery for First-Class Mail, including ballots,
was 2.5 days," USPS said in an Oct. 29 release.
Impossible and improbable return dates indicate there's something wrong with either the
database or the ballots.
Objective facts show that Trump won Pennsylvania.
-- Will the system work?
-- Or, will the Blue Coup cause the Constitution to collapse?
Why should he concede when he won the elections? In fact, Dem crazy policies and senile
half-dead nominee resulted in them losing votes. Apparently, they believed their own lies,
taking their own psyop "polls" at face value. Massive fraud needed to push their corpse ahead
was so crude and ham-handed because it was perpetrated in a hurry. If the fraud stands, the
US is kaput. If Trump succeeds in insisting on real results, the US would keep sliding down
slowly. Either way, the direction is down, the only difference is the speed.
@Verymuchalive US elections because you back both horses. It doesn't matter about where
the "Jewish" vote goes. It's not about ordinary Jews. It's the Zionist power structure and
the big money: Adelson for the Repubs, Saban for the Dems = both bases covered.
Even a not sufficiently Zionist like Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish himself, is blocked
because he's not subservient enough to be a minion and horror of horrors, supports a few
basic Palestinian human rights and a more balanced policy.
It's easy. They only have to cover 2 bases because there are no viable 3rd parties nor
will there ever be under this system, nor is it a direct vote anyway. There will be no change
as long as this duopoly persists.
I absolutely agree with this author's conclusion, the president should fight.
Absolutely, he won the elections. However, he thinks that the fight is for him, but in
reality it is for the American electoral system in particular and the whole political system
in general. If this obvious fraud is allowed to stand, the Empire is doomed. If true result
is recovered, the slide down would be slow.
If those clever wascally Ds so easily rigged the Prez race for Joey Depends, then why
didn't those same clever wascally Ds also rig a few more Senatorial races and capture the
Congress?
@nsa ad to manufacture hundreds of thousands in each swing state. Apparently, the supply
of the cheaters was insufficient, and dishonest poll workers were available only in several
places (hence the turnout in some places went way above 100%). Sloppy job. Next time they
might prepare better. Say, they had more time manufacturing all those mail-in ballots from
dead people (naturally, all dead people voted for half-corpse). If mail-in voting remains on
the books next time, I expect a lot stronger turnout among the dead.
A single frog is worth more than Joey Depends and Poor Widdle Donnie put together
Now, that is true, but the frog was not on the ballot. It could have won.
The presidential
election was on Tuesday and we still don't know the outcome. If you followed the Florida
recount 20 years ago, you probably assume you've got some idea of how this will play out.
Officials in contested states will carefully count all the available votes, supervised by
bipartisan observers from both campaigns, to reassure all of us it's on the level. If they find
irregularities or they see questions of fraud, we'll all get to learn exactly what those
allegations are and how they were resolved. That's what we did in 2000. Remember hanging chads?
We put them on TV so people could see the ballots for themselves.
In the end, the dispute between Al Gore and George W. Bush continued all the way to the
Supreme Court. It took 36 days to resolve and every one of those days, if you remember them,
seemed like a month. That process was excruciating, it required patience and calm, but in the
end, it was well worth it.
For the record, the news organizations in this country covered every moment of it. No one in
any newsroom in America even considered censoring information about what was happening. That
would have been regarded as grotesque and immoral. Then, as now, almost everyone in the media
was a partisan Democrat. But in 2000, they understood that preserving the public's faith in the
system was more important than getting Al Gore or anyone else into the White House. So they
pushed for openness and transparency in the process, and thank God they did.
A lot has changed over two decades. It's entirely possible now that someday soon the news
media will decide to shut this election down. Believe it or not, they effectively have the
power to do that. Let's say officials in Philadelphia produce a large number of newly counted
votes. The Pennsylvania secretary of state hastily ratifies them, puts a seal of approval on
them and then declares Joe Biden the winner.
Winning Pennsylvania would put Joe Biden over the threshold of 270 electoral votes, so Joe
Biden is now the president-elect. But how many of the 69 million Americans who voted for Donald
Trump this week would believe that and accept it at this point? Not very many. Not that anyone
cares, and of course, the fact that no one cares is the reason they voted for Donald Trump in
the first place.
I think Tucker Carlson is wrong. I believe there are enough fraudulent votes to
change the result -- if the recount is done honestly. WI, MI, GA, PA could all flip, even AZ
and NV. The DNC is run by End Justifies Means people who believe everything they do is
justified due to Holocaust, Slavery, yada yada.
MSM is working hard to try to make this a foregone conclusion. Each day we hear about
Biden this Biden that, Biden's Transition Team, Biden's New Cabinet, Biden's Foreign Policy,
Biden's Trade policy Instead of feeling discouraged, I hope this actually gets Trump and his
lawyers fired up to push for recounts. He just filed a new lawsuit in MI. There is no reason
why the recounts have not started in WI, GA and PA. It's total BS. The longer this drags on,
the harder it'll be to overturn the results. They need to press on.
Going forward the GOP needs to push hard for a Voting Integrity Act that mandates all
voter registration must be approved by social security office to verify citizenship status. I
suspect a high number of voters esp. in blue states like CA and WA are non-citizens, from
tens of thousands to millions, since the DMV asks everyone to register to vote and never
check their citizenship status. In WA the ballot used to ask people to confirm they are US
citizens before signing the ballot with indication of fines/jail time for non-citizens who
vote, but they've removed that warning entirely in all ballots since 2016.
The Voting Integrity Act should include a mass audit of the voter registration in every
state, with a national database that detects people who are registered to vote in more than
one state. Even if Trump doesn't prevail due to mass cheating in the recounts, the GOP needs
to put this Voting Integrity Act in place or they will never win another election.
Also, Mayor Giuliani has claimed mamy Cases of Fraud and is Filing Lawsuits as Trump's
Lawyer.
Also, Tucker Carlson has also claimed that his Team have verified a good number of
Reported Incidents.
Statistical Analyses Claimants are coming forward as well.
Those who claim that there were none or not enough - including you, B - need to read
around a bit more and wait before making presumptive assessments when we don't have All the
Claim Cases, related Data, and Votes Affected.
Personally, I've seen enough to believe this Election is Compromised. Dominion are
allegedly vested by the Pelosis (which alone raise a few Red Flags for a RICO
Investigation).
It may be Prudent to Not only Hold Audits; but Redo the Federal Election Seats (WH and
Congress) again with Federal Ballots Monitored by Federal Personnel.
Biden should have been sent to Bethesda/Walter Reed/Hopkins for an Alzheimer's/Dementia
Review Panel (put my Own Mother through the Drill every several years prior to her going to
her Nursing Home); and Hunter should have been Arrested for Crack/Child Molestation while
being further investigated for MoneyLaundering/RICO with Pops.
Giuliani is Confident Here As Well. One thing for Certain, B, is that Giuliani has an
Outstanding Reputation as a Federal Prosecutor; and Does. Not. Bπ££$#!+.
Around. When it comes to Criminal Cases.
I'll rely on Giuliani's Assessments more than anyone else's on this Matter.
Look either way the Banker Oligarchs win. Why fight over the scraps, neither one party or
leader represents the little guy (defined these days as those with less than 100m USD in
assets).
A new issue has turned up in Pennsylvania putting another 100,000+ ballots in line for
exclusion: (1)
Over 51,000 ballots were marked as returned just a day after they were sent out -- an
extraordinary speed, given U.S. Postal Service (USPS) delivery times, while nearly 35,000
were returned on the same day they were mailed out. Another more than 23,000 have a return
date earlier than the sent date. More than 9,000 have no sent date.
"Since October 1, the average time of delivery for First-Class Mail, including ballots,
was 2.5 days," USPS said in an Oct. 29 release.
Impossible and improbable return dates indicate there's something wrong with either the
database or the ballots.
Objective facts show that Trump won Pennsylvania.
-- Will the system work?
-- Or, will the Blue Coup cause the Constitution to collapse?
In today's episode of America's Next Zionist President, we have an insider giving us all
an accurate description of our beloved US constitutional republic and democracy which we must
fight to protect:
For rational people, the media's outlandish bias and presumptive misinformation will not
end well for their handlers. True, in a fake new soylent green economy, businesses don't need
customers and politicians don't need constituents – you can just manufacture them, and
pay yourself with your own money by decree. But reality has a way of eventually creeping in
(as you gag on your fake beyond meat burger).
The reality here is that we need to take a step back from the media frenzy and recognize
rule of law. Concession cannot even be legally possible for several weeks as it stands today.
And the only excuse for Biden falsely claiming victory is that he is too senile to observe
Constitutional law.
The Don is done. Lindsey and Mitch and their Dem co-conspirators will be thrilled to get
back to business as usual. Motives aside he did change things a bit in between hiring and
firing everyone in sight.
To much of a rocky ride Washington doesn't like that no criminal enterprise does.
Don't cry for Don he'll bounce back this is a man who lost three casinos then went on to
hawking steaks and finally ended up as President. A real life 21st. century Jack Armstrong.
He can write a book play some golf, Melania can go on doing her Eva Gabor impersonation and
Don Jr. and Eric can do whatever it is they do. And as for us we're all on a slow boat to
China most likely to work at one of those Sino-Ivanka Fashion Inc. factories.
Big Brother has spoken. Even Fox News has kicked Trump's ass into the shithole and called
the election for Biden. Tucker Carlson may also be looking for the exit or he has been
instructed to change his tune if he wants to keep his job which in all likelihood he will
comply. Trump lovers and sympathisers better face up to the bitter reality and take to the
hill to prepare a defense against brutal persecution by their enemies who will come after
them with unimaginable passion right after Jan 20, 2021. They already have THE LIST and names
are being added to it fast and furious. Bread and circus, people!
Come on, get real. American voters were presented with two donkeys and puppets of Israel
as candidates. Millions voted for one or the other of two donkeys both of whom dance to the
beat of Jewish drums. Come to think about it, which American president in recent memory has
not outfawned his predecessor on Israel? Jewish power owns us. End of.
Tucker Carlson said, " At this stage , the fraud that we can confirm does not
seem to be enough to alter the election result." That's a far cry from, "There's not
enough fraud to change the election results." Newsweek's paraphrasing is, therefore, itself
fraudulent and part of the gigantic Democrat gaslighting campaign to convince the nation Joe
Biden is the legitimate winner. It should not be repeated here without the actual quote and a
caveat.
This also goes to the wider issue of trying to be reasonable and fair when dealing with
Democrat cockroaches who are anything but. They will unfailingly distort measured and
diplomatic language. It's best to make no concessions to them.
I don't give a rat's butt about trump or biden. As far as I'm concerned they'll always be
two draft dodger/shirkers and nothing more. Interesting how both of them hid in college in
the 60's and refused to serve as privates in the army but think they should be able to have
the power to send men in harms way.
Actually, the Zionists and the Jewish vote generally were overwhelmingly for Biden. They
were very hostile to Trump. Why would they do this if Trump were a Zionist minion ? Because
he's not.
Trump wants to normalise relations with Russia and pull US troops out of the Middle East,
including Syria. These moves are very much opposed to Zionist aims and the interests of
Israel. Unsurprisingly, Netanyahu was very quick to recognise Biden as the winner. That's
because Biden really is a Zionist minion.
@Roacheforque every TDS normie discussed it like it had a real chance of occurring
despite not having thought out how exactly how such a ridiculous event would take place on a
practical level. Added to which the 'homey' comments coming from diaper Bill and Kameltoe
Harris have a overly saccharine flavour to them, more likely scripted with great thought put
in as opposed to spontaneous quotes from some gosh darn nice people who want to heal the
nation such that anyone trying to prevent them from doing so necessarily must be evil.
If the Zerohedge article is accurate, thank you for posting it. If it has weaknesses
perhaps some poster could point them out. It is the most sane thing that I have read on the
topic since the 3rd.
No Surrender! President Trump Should Not Concede -- No Matter What
Sure just like Hillary should not have conceded in 2016, when they had strong evidence of
electronic vote rigging.
Look either way the Banker Oligarchs win. Why fight over the scraps, neither one party or
leader represents the little guy (defined these days as those with less than 100m USD in
assets).
The Zio Banking elite wins hands down right now Biden or Trump. At least Biden might keep
some social services like Soc Sec, Medicare, and Obama Care!!!! Yes the public deserves to
get something for paying all these taxes not just the Oligarchial super rich who were openly
looting the Fed budget under Trump. The unthinking and unemployed working/middle class,
especially the Whites amongst them seem to put their crisis of identity ahead of their well
being. Daaah.
What did Trump (led by his handlers Kushner/Ivanka) do for the little guy except fill
their heads with racial antagonisms and anti-government innuendo (some true but most false).
For sure he fulfilled every Zio-Israeli fantasy at the expense of US interests. Yes, no
problem for the unquestioning MAGA types, but where did he lead America to, to the precipice
of a pending national disaster?
So stop tearing down the constitutional republic, preserve what the general public still
has left to protect their individual rights and economic well being. Obviously the elite is
pushing for civil unrest so they can bring on a military and dictatorial regime, where all
sorts of new control straps can be implemented.
Kirkpatrick you are shameful for stoking the embers of civil unrest! Nobody is calling for
unity and statesmen like leadership these days on RU report. Biden is looking much more
leader like than cry baby Trump. Trump as you like to say -- -- -- -- – YOUR
FIRED!!!!!Man-up and get out and move on and get a life.
Only idiots and fools still want to carry Fake and Slimy Politicians on top of their
shoulders. Find some brains and lobby for your own interests, no politician in this system
will work for you unless forced to by their electorate.
[Reflections on the late election, by Curtis Yarvin, Gray Mirror, November 8, 2020].
Because I began my journey to 'red-pilled' awareness thanks to Curtis 'Mencius Moldbug'
Yarvin, I naturally clicked on the link and read his piece. One has travelled far since
reading his 'Unqualified Reservations' blog way back on 2007-08, and I now agree with much of
Andrew Joyce's recent critique of Yarvin ( https://www.unz.com/article/jews-in-the-cathedral-a-response-to-curtis-yarvin/
)
However, I frequently chuckled while reading Yarvin's piece linked by James Kirkpatrick,
and marvelled anew at the quality and brilliance of his insights. In this regard it rather
took me back in time twelve or so years.
A sample or two:
After describing how Trump could legally take full and absolute personal power for the
length of his second term, Yarvin points out that what is required amounts to nothing less
than 'regime change', and states that 'A true regime change must be a revolution in every
sense of the word Of course, since the right is order and the left is chaos, the left-wing
revolution is a butcher and the right-wing revolution is a surgeon. If ours needs to keep its
bandages on for a few days, theirs can barely be sold as hamburger. And even before her
stitches are out, America feels and looks better than ever.'
He goes on:
'One lesson that should be appreciated by all sides in all civic conflicts is that force
is not another word for violence. Force is the opposite of violence. Violence is bad, and
force is good. Violence is chaos, and force is order. Violence is slow and force is fast.
'If you can win by force, what are you waiting for? Do it immediately. If you can't win
without violence, you probably can't win at all, and you probably shouldn't try. Much
bloodshed could be saved if all young persons were educated with these simple and timeless
Machiavellian principles'.
And earlier, he explains the role of elections in a 'democracy' as being to assess the
power of each side's support, and that this power ought to reflect actual physical strength
and or courage, remarking:
'The fundamental purpose of a democratic election is to test the strength of the sides in
a civil conflict, without anyone actually getting hurt. The majority wins because the
strongest side would win. Better to measure that by counting heads, than knocking heads; and
counting heads produces a reasonable guess as to who would win a head-knocking contest. Same
outcome, fewer concussions: a Pareto optimization.
'But this guess is much better if it actually measures humans who are both willing and
able to walk down the street and show up. Anyone who cannot show up at the booth is unlikely
to show up for the civil war. This is one of many reasons that an in-person election is a
more accurate election. (If voters could be qualified by physique, it would be even more
accurate.)
'My sense is that in many urban communities, voting by proxy in some sense is the norm.
The people whose names are on the ballots really exist; and almost all of them actually did
support China Joe. Or at least, preferred him. The extent to which they perform any tangible
political action, including physically going to the booth, is very low; so is their
engagement with the political system. The demand for records of their engagement is very
high, because each such datum cancels out some huge, heavily-armed redneck with a bass
boat.'
Your obsession with Jews is really misplaced here. As soon as anyone starts blaming the
Jews, that person has immediately branded himself unfit for further comment.
Trump had four years to do something about election fraud. Didn't do a thing. Kinda funny
Trump and those Senator Georgians that sucked up to blacks thought blacks would actually vote
for them. Georgia and trump lost! Maybe taught them a lesson! I doubt it. Georgia has been
overrun with Hispanics and absolutely flooded with H-1B Indians for years too . The GOP has
committed suicide and taken the rest of America down with it. But hey, they made a few bucks
doing it! Maybe trump can do another publicity stunt with a rapper to save his campaign.
The problems with the election are just a mirror image of the problems with this country.
Fake money, fake border, fake pandemic, fake scholarship, fake news, fake food, fake votes.
Did I miss anything?
@TheTrumanShow ll decide. and failing that, the congress shall decide.. If a candidate
interferes with that constitutional process, changes or alters it to suit a personal
circumstance, he or she invites the crowd operated guillotine, i fear.
I agree the election process in many states is subject to corruption.. but Trump had four
years to change that process. like most things he did not provide the leadership needed to
get the masses to help him do just that.. Now Trump complains ..to the very people who
expected more from him .. and seeks to circumvent their intentions. I hope not?
I learned long ago: the pilot that does not pay the mechanic, pays the undertaker, when
the engine quits at 15000 feet.
I am an Australian living in an Australian country town. My email address is recognisably
Australian. I have never lived in the US. I have never even been there in fact.
Yet I have been inundated with election propaganda from the Democrats (from the other side
nary a peep).
Recently an organisation that goes under the name "Fight for Reform"invited me, as a "Top
Democrat in your state", to sign a card to congratulate "Joe and Kamala" testyifying that I
too had been crying "tears of joy" about their election.
When I didn't react I was asked, virtually the day after, why I hadn't done so. They were
"running low on support from"registered Democrats" "so please
Well, if you think that Biden and Harris will serve Israel any less than Trump, then you
should be willing to purchase my Jewless estate of 500,000 acres in NY, which comes with 6000
square foot fully restored 19th century house, a 2500 square foot guest house, and a horse
barn. It also comes with both a real pond and a ce- ment pond. I'm asking only
$600,000. It's a steal of a bargain.
In other words, according to you, the Jews as individuals, organizations, or as a people
may never be blamed for anything. Methinks it is YOU wearing the brand that says "unfit for
further comment".
Ultimately, the entire battle is about who is sovereign in this country -- American
citizens or
LOL! I haven't seen the words "sovereignty" and "American people" in the same sentence for
quite some time. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is not simply restricted to American people,
as it applies to all peoples of the West.
We must muster the will to shift this balance of power.
Whining about jail time over tax laws is why Trump has to fight? He can tell us
deplorables it is for us. Its not. It will be about preserving his empire. As much as I want
the corrupt PA democrats to finally get theirs in this legal process, I support Trump in his
fight for himself. If you twerps are allowed to destroy someone like a President Trump, just
imagine what you will do to a mere lunch lady for using the wrong pronoun. Please for once in
your miserable life admit your side is not made up of good people but rather a whole bunch of
totalitarian dictatorial wannabes. Scarily you keep moving the goalposts of your endgame
because every victory is never enough to satiate the rumble in your hollow souls.
By Caitlin Johnstone , an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website
is here and you can follow her on
Twitter @caitoz
'Trump
derangement syndrome' didn't come from Trump. It came from abusive media trying to spin the
evils of his presidency as somehow worse than any other US president's.
The word "coup" is being thrown about in American liberal media today, not because US
liberals suddenly became uncomfortable with the fact that their nation constantly stages coups
and topples governments around the world as a matter of routine policy, but because they are
all talking about (you guessed it) Donald Trump.
To be clear, none of the high-powered influencers who have been promoting the use of this
word actually believe there is any possibility that Donald Trump will somehow remain in office
after January of next year when he loses his legal appeals against the official results of the
election, which would be the thing that a coup is. There is no means or institutional support
through which the sitting president could accomplish such a thing. This is not a coup, it's a
glorified temper tantrum. Trump will leave office at the appointed time.
The establishment narrative managers are not terrifying their audiences with this word
because they believe there is any danger of a coup actually happening. They are doing it
because it's their last chance to use Trump to psychologically abuse their audiences for
clicks.
... ... ...
It is not Trump himself who's been making people feel terrified of a tyrannical Russian
agent ending democracy in America and ruling with an iron fist, it is years of shrieking,
hysterical coverage about Trump from the mass media.
Without all the deranged and persistent fearmongering, driven by a disdain for Trump's
unrefined narrative management
style and an insatiable hunger for ratings and clicks, it would never have occurred to
Americans that they should be more terrified of this president than of any other sh***y
Reaganite Republican. The Russian collusion narrative which dominated most of Trump's
presidency
turned out tobe essentially
nothing . The concentration camps, millions of deportations and armed militias driving
non-whites out of the country that we were promised never came; he never even
came anywhere close to Obama's deportation numbers and his
support from minorities actually went up. He hasn't been any more warlike than his
predecessors overall, and by some measures arguably less so. Most Americans actually reported that
their lives had improved over Trump's term before the pandemic hit.
If people had just been given raw information about Trump's presidency, they would have seen
a lot of bad things, but things that are bad in the same way all the horrible aspects of the
most destructive government on earth are bad. They wouldn't have known to be horrified and
anxious and have headaches and irritable bowel syndrome. They would have handled themselves in
about the same way they always handled themselves during the administration of a president they
didn't like.
Instead, they were psychologically terrorized. Made frightened, sick and traumatized by mass
media pundits who only care about ratings and clicks, as was made clear when CBS chief Les
Moonves famously
said that Trump is bad for America but great for CBS. Dragged through years of Russia
hysteria and Trump hysteria with any excuse to spin Trump's presidency as a remarkable
departure from norms, when in reality it was anything but. It was a fairly conventional
Republican presidency.
In reality, though most of them probably did not realize it, this is what Americans were
actually voting against when they turned out in record numbers to cast their votes. Not against
Trump, but against this continued psychological abuse they've been suffering both directly and
indirectly from the mass media. Against being bashed in the face by shrieking, hysterical
bull***t that hurts their bodies and makes them feel crazy, and against the unpleasantness of
having to interact with stressed-out compatriots who haven't been putting up well with the
abuse.
It wasn't a "Get him out" vote, it was a "Make it stop" vote.
Meanwhile, another pernicious effect of making Trump seem uniquely horrible has been
retroactively making his predecessors seem nice by comparison, which is why George W Bush now
enjoys majority support among Democrats
after years of unpopularity. Their depravity is hidden behind a media-generated wall labeled
"NOT TRUMP" . And when Biden steps into office, his depravity will be hidden from view in the
same way, neutering all mainstream opposition to his most deadly and dangerous
actions .
The First Rule , 5 hours ago
I certainly hope this isn't True. You should never surrender to Evil.
Too many people succumb to the psychological warfare that has been raging against us for 5
decades. It is very difficult to break free from the indoctrination regardless of
intelligence or education. The backbone of the DemonRat organization is a very strong emotion
that overcomes all logic and reason. It is HATE. Today it is called by the gentle name of
Identity Politics. Nevertheless, it is still a HATE based psychological manipulation. Women
need to HATE men. Blacks need to HATE everyone. Whites need to HATE themselves. Everybody
needs to HATE Trump.
Did anybody vote FOR Biden or Harris?
The DemonRats have the Deep State covering, aiding and abetting their insurrection. As we
have seen, the stupid white people support the peaceful protests and are played like a violin
by the professional agitators likely trained by the CIA & FBI. The BLM aristocracy claims
to be "trained Marxists". Trained by whom? Nobody asks.
The cops are used like trained dogs to attack everyone who opposes the BLM/Antifa
sanctioned riots to the point where citizens are afraid of the cops and the BLM/Antifa people
use the cops for target practice, and the cops just take it. Nobody really respects the FBI
or the cops anymore.
Then there is the constant 24/7 drum beat of propaganda from the MSM and social media
driving people crazy.
Welcome to the world of Kamala Pelosi.
With Trump gone, who will they hate next?
DemonRats: The Party of Lies & HATE
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of
your own choosing.
- Orwell
archon , 2 hours ago
Every time Maddow speaks she reminds me that we're living in clownworld. Lets not forget
this is coming from people who spent the last four years attempting their own coup.
cankles' server , 4 hours ago
I'm not sure if twitter deleted but here's the youtube link
Rubert's media empire was just a stepping stone for gigs like a sitting board of director
with Genie Oil. Even with that Fox News has always been neocon. If most conservative types
weren't enamored with supporting the troops, who will be just like the cops in supporting the
establishment in any civil war, then they would have known Fox News was controlled opposition
for the deep state.
Rupert Murdoch's heirs are #NeverTrump Libtards. They have been systematically
installing SJW Globalists for some time. The day-to-day programming has flipped to Fake
Stream Media propaganda. It is no surprise that they went full TDS for election coverage.
The above link will provide you with a FREE KlowdTV subscription to OAN and eleven other
channels for the remainder of 2020. Easy to do, two quick steps. DUMP FOX! Pass it on.
Tucker Carlson may also be looking for the exit or he has been instructed to change his
tune if he wants to keep his job which in all likelihood he will comply.
Yes, Carlson's program last night was decidedly more milquetoast than the night before.
His choice of topics was much more mundane. Perhaps he has gotten the word.
Tucker Carlson is toeing the Fox editorial line by claiming not enough fraudulent votes to
change the outcome. The only question is how was he coerced into making this statement -- was
it the carrot or the stick? Both? The stick would be he gets fired from Fox. The carrot would
be he gets major pay raise, promotion, or even getting help set up as front runner for
2024.
TC is no longer to be trusted. I have felt that about him for some time as his website
Daily Caller started toeing the Zionist line with increasing hostility towards China this
past year. He's now just controlled opposition like Stephen Miller, Breitbart.
Note that Carlson did NOT say, as the article falsely states, "Tucker Carlson Says There's
Not Enough Fraud to Change Election Results", he said:
At this stage, the fraud that we can confirm does not seem to be enough to alter the
election result . We should be honest and tell you that. Of course, that could change,"
he said, on his Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight.
I believe Carlson will spotlight the fraud claims on his program tonight.
Third, on the international front, we can expect even more hysterical Russia bashing
(the Dems all hate Russia with a passion, especially since they have brainwashed themselves
for four years that "Putin" had "attacked" the US elections). But there is really nothing
the US can do to Russia, it is way too late for that. So I would expect even more hot air
than from the Trump Administration, and probably not much more action, although that is by
no means certain, since a braindead nominal President like Biden would not have Trump's
intelligence to understand that a war against Russia, China or Iran would end in a
disaster: Dems always start wars to try to convince the public that they are "tough"
(Dukakis in his M-1 tank).
The Dems don't hate Russia it is used as a bogeyman to re direct the populace anget at the
neoliberal social system .
Russia, China, Iran and all the rest of the world probably can't believe their good
fortune the US is destroying itself.
Biden will not be in control of the US, or any part of it he will be in the corner pissing
his pants. The Deep State will be calling the shots.
By C. J. Hopkins , award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist
based in Berlin. His dystopian novel, ' Zone 23 ', is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. His essays and other works can be found at,
and he can be reached via, cjhopkins.com
or consentfactory.org . OK, so,
that was not cool. For one terrifying moment there, it actually looked like GloboCap was going
to let Russian-Asset Hitler win.
Hour after hour on election night, states on the map kept turning red, or pink, or some
distinctly non-blue color. Wisconsin Michigan Georgia Florida. It could not be happening, and
yet it was. What other explanation was there? The Russians were stealing the election
again!
But, of course, GloboCap was just playing with us. They're a bunch of practical jokers,
those GloboCap guys. Naturally, they couldn't resist the chance to wind us up just one more
time.
Seriously, though, while I enjoy a good prank, I still have a number of liberal friends,
many of whom were on the verge of suffering major heart attacks as they breathlessly waited for
the corporate media to confirm that they had successfully voted a literal
dictator out of power. (A few of them suffer from IBS or other gastrointestinal disorders,
so, in light of the current toilet-paper shortage caused by the Return of the Apocalyptic
Plague, toying with them like that was especially cruel.)
But, whatever. That's water under the bridge. The good news is, the nightmare is
over! Literal Hitler and his underground army of Russia-loving white supremacists have been
vanquished! Decency has been restored! Globalization has risen from the
dead!
... ... ..
Meanwhile, the GloboCap propaganda has reached some new post-Orwellian level. After four
long years of "RUSSIA HACKED THE ELECTION!" now, suddenly, "THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS
ELECTION FRAUD IN THE USA!"
That's right, once again, millions of liberals, like that scene in ' 1984' where the
Party switches official enemies right in the middle of the Hate-Week speech, have been ordered
to radically reverse their "reality," and hysterically deny the existence of the very
thing they have been hysterically alleging for four solid years and they are actually doing
it!
... ... ///
Marian1637 7 hours ago
I can not comprehend
that democrats do not blame Putin for Biden winning!
Reilly 3 hours ago
Very funny, bravo!
Nothing like a bit of slapstick, with a dose of reality also in the middle of a waking
nightmare about to happen. ;))
DeoGratias 4 hours ago
One correction : it is not GloboCap it is
GloboComs. The objective of communism is to create two classes of a society : rulers and
workers. Thus GloboCaps are GloboComs.
Winter7Mute 5 hours ago
A reliable way to make people
believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished
from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact. I'm not even
sure if most journalists or reporters know what their even talking about, when writing these
articles.
Vidarr Kerr 5 hours ago
There is such a thing as Too Much Sarcasm.
EarthBotV2 Vidarr Kerr 4 hours ago
I disagree. The liberazi "thinks" with the gut -- as in "What does your gut tell you?"...
"... But while they now have the power, globalists do not have solutions to the country problems, and the crisis of neoliberalism (which started in 2008) will continue, the far-right nationalism will stay and may even gain strength. This suggests that in 2024 is somebody like Tucker Carlson will lead the ticket. And Tucker is a more dangerous opponent to neoliberal Dems than Trump ever been. "Trumpism without Trump" will live, so to speak. ..."
Interesting piece by Beinart about the obvious question that isn't being asked: Why did
Trump lose? After all he had the advantages of incumbency, until February the stock market was
booming, wages were rising, things were going great.
Answer: because he was not nearly radical enough. Because he was a weak leader who was
captured by the Republican elite (not the other way round). Also (rather ironic this) because
he was and is a terrible negotiater. He continually caved into the likes of Mitch McConnell,
and, well the rest is history.
Question: will 'super Trump' in 4 or 8 years time manage to follow the Eastern European
template and create a genuine populist party? (economically social democratic, particularly
concentrating on pensioners: extremely hostile to immigration, skeptical of environmental
issues, culturally conservative?). If so the future is the Republicans' but it's a big if.
...he was a weak leader who was captured by the Republican elite (not the other way
round). Also (rather ironic this) because he was and is a terrible negotiator. He
continually caved into the likes of Mitch McConnell, and, well the rest is history.
All true. But Biden victory in some ways looks like Catch 22 for neoliberal Dems (Will the
Democrats Ever Make Sense of This Week? – New Republic):
In sum, if the results we have hold, Joe Biden will win the election and preside over a
divided Congress. A chastened and anxious Democratic caucus will continue to hold the
House.
A triumphant Senate Republican caucus will obviously destroy his major legislative
agenda. Biden will assuredly turn to policy by executive action, just as Barack Obama did
late in his legislatively stymied administration.
When he does, Republicans will do all they can to send those actions to a 6–3
conservative Supreme Court Biden will be unable to pack or meaningfully reform.
In defeating Trump, Democrats will have avoided their worst-case scenario. Instead, they
will have won the worst possible Biden victory, a political situation that will be a
nightmare all its own.
Trump, with his "national neoliberalism," was an anomaly in its own right. And such things
do not last long. So this is a kind of "return to normal" -- return to power of the
"internationalist" faction of Oligarchy who is linked to globalization (and constitutes the
majority of the US oligarchy), which was unexpectedly defeated in 2016 and since then foght
tooth and nail for the return to power. And such "normalization" is the most logical outcome
of the 2020 elections and is to be expected.
But while they now have the power, globalists do not have solutions to the country problems,
and the crisis of neoliberalism (which started in 2008) will continue, the far-right
nationalism will stay and may even gain strength. This suggests that in 2024 is somebody like
Tucker Carlson will lead the ticket. And Tucker is a more dangerous opponent to neoliberal
Dems than Trump ever been. "Trumpism without Trump" will live, so to speak.
That may spell troubles for the well-being of the PMC (professional and management class)
to which we all belong.
I would add that the fact that Biden victory legitimized Russia-gate and abuse of their
power by intelligence agencies is also a problem. I suspect that Neo-McCarthyism, in the long
run, might backfire.
Fox News Channel's Tucker Carlson says Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is "happy to sell out his voters with an amnesty deal" after
he suggested finding "common ground" with Democrats on immigration.
During a segment Friday night, Carlson called out Graham -- who just won reelection in South Carolina --
for suggesting to the Senate Republican caucus that their agenda next year could include working with Democrats on amnesty for
11 to 22 million illegal aliens. Carlson asked:
Who's excited to greet our new corporate overlords? Who plans to collaborate, particularly who on the right side, the Republican
side, the side that said it was defending you. Who's happy about all of this? That seems worth keeping track of just so we know
who we're dealing with here.
I was particularly interested in the comments of Lindsey Graham who just won reelection in the state of South Carolina because
conservatives voted for him the people around Trump put a great deal of pressure on Lindsey Graham to send them money, so after
a day or two, he made a great show of sending them $500,000.
But then on the issues that matter, Lindsey Graham immediately ran away from the ideas that he claimed to support and said
that he would be happy to sell out his voters with an amnesty deal, like within hours of the election.
You have a deeply flawed party that refuses to protect its own voters and represent their legitimate interests but they are
the only hope that this country doesn't descend into something unrecognizable. It puts 70 million decent people in a tough spot.
Already, America First conservatives and immigration reformers are
pushing back against Graham's comments.
"The new base of the Republican Party is the American working class, of all races. 'Common ground' on immigration reform is code
for amnesty, and amnesty is an insult to the millions who voted GOP in the election," Bostonians Against Sanctuary Cities President
Lou Murray told Breitbart News.
Currently, there are about 20 million Americans who are jobless or underemployed, mostly due to the Chinese coronavirus crisis,
but all of whom want full-time jobs.
Economists have found that their
job opportunities and wages can be easily diminished by
high immigration levels.
One particular study by the Center for Immigration Studies' Steven Camarota revealed that for every one percent increase in the
immigrant portion of American workers' occupation, their weekly wages are cut by perhaps 0.5 percent. This means the average native-born
American worker today has his weekly wages reduced by potentially 8.75 percent, since
more than 17 percent of the workforce is foreign-born.
The high immigration policy is a boon for giant corporations, real estate investors, Wall Street, university systems, and Big
Agriculture that can cash in on an economy that offers low wages to a flooded U.S. labor market.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder .
To start one's own party is not so easy and outright impossible under the current conditions. If the majority of GOP supports
him then the best course would be to purge and reinvigorate GOP: he should issue a call of action to his supporters and create the
situation when those who use their membership to their own benefits will be forced to step down or cancel the membership. By purging
I don't mean filling it in with 'yes-men': they don't have to be obliged to love Trump; criticism is essential, but these people
have to be able to differentiate between the personal and common when on service. They all have to be loyal to the America First.
If you call yourself 'Republican' then behave like one or choose another party. Such RINOs are materially motivated - they never
couldn't build a career in the Dems Party, especially now, with the Squad; they can't start their own Party - nobody will vote them,
because they'll be the party of traitors and sell-outs. Benny Too Too
deploritarian •
2 days ago
No your corrupt corp fraud media did it to him along with hussein osama's weaponized US agencies! Now go back to watching CNN
lying hate media to get even more stupid
With 25 Million Illegal Aliens in our Country the Democrats have an absolute Lock on this and future Elections by enabling them
to Vote. No Voter ID laws, Sanctuary Cities awarding them all Privileges of US Citizens from Drivers Licenses and access to all welfare
state programs. We are not a Sovereign Nation any longer. ANITFA called it in their Protests "No More BORDERS. Democrats support
this Treasonous Group because it gives them perpetual control of Washington.
Elibar deploritarian •
2 days ago
Better European papers? LOL! I live in Europe and can tell you they're every bit as lying and partisan as the MSM EVERYWHERE!
Practically every European national broadcaster and newspaper gets s o r o s funding, unless you happen to read Hungarian. For instance,
the long defunct Italian Radical party's radio station was close to collapse due to lack of support. They are now back on air admitting
the Hungarian pos gave them almost 400,000 euro if they supported 'immigration'. Read the Beano, it's far more informative.
The GOP will stand with Trump, and Trump will be legally reelected. The Michigan Legislature
just convened a special session to consider the widespread ballot stuffing, technical
"glitches," and other suspicious activity in their election. Everyone in Michigan knows that
Trump and James won that election in a landslide.
The Democrats all stopped counting in numerous states on election night to give them time to
"create" some extra mail-in Biden votes.
The legislature, controlled by the GOP, will invalidate the election if there is evidence of
fraud. They have the Constitutional right to instruct the electors. America will not let the
Democrats steal an election the way they do in Venezuela. THIS JUST IN: The Wisconsin
legislature, controlled also by the GOP, has been called to investigate voter fraud too!!
Milwaukee had an unprecedented 91% return rate, more than any precinct in history by 20 points.
No fraud? We'll see. TruLogix Dennis
Mastin •
2 days ago
Yeah good luck. The work has been done. The ballots removed are long gone. GOP is to blame
this was obvious and they put nothing in place to stop this knowing it was most likely part of
the plan with all of the dems fighting tooth and nail for mail in. Bullet2354 Avery Bierce •
2 days ago • edited
In places like Michigan, more republicans requested Absentee Ballots than Democrats...
And More republicans returned their Absentee Ballots than Democrats....
The 20% could be mostly Biden... but 80-20%. Dems did pick up votes... but so did Trump!
And while I know you feel some republicans did not like Trump... all polling done this year
shows 89-94% of Republicans were supporting Trump - actually much higher than Dem support for
Biden...
- the Trump 'Voter Enthusiasm was off the charts"..... Biden had historic LOW 'voter enthusiasm
most of the summer.
Also - many Bernie People (about 25% in spring) stated they would never vote Democrat after
what the DNC did to Bernie in 2016 and 2020. Maybe the came back to Biden - but I don't know...
I did not see Bernie people rallying for Joe at all.
I think the "ILLEGAL BALLOT ISSUE" IS NOW WHAT THE FOCUS is moving too...
Voting Laws were abused... Late ballots, fake registrations, 'the dead,' ghost mail in
ballot.... -and intentionally and illegally manipulated ballots - even poll workers admitting
they tossed Trump votes because they hate him so much...
Of course, support for Biden isn't in issue. Exasperation with Trump is clearly the
issue.
Independents don't generally support Trump this year.
I don't think many Bernie people would vote for Trump. That doesn't make much sense.
Yes, clearly Trump wants lawyers to argue about ballots being illegal. I guess he thinks they
might be able to show enough ballots were illegal, and that most of the illegal ballots were
for Biden. Ball is in their court on that, I guess. But in court, Trump won't be able to argue
in the form of tweets that say "we've been hearing about so much fraud." Time to put
up.
Court challenges are coming.... that is for sure...
Supreme Court already has the PA rulings and is looking at that.
I do think overall Election Integrity has been compromised... at almost every level and
every step of the process. Ghost ballots sent out, Mail in ballots sold for cash, 'the dead,'
Fake Ids', out of state voters voting multiple times, dates and signatures altered, ballots
trashed by partisan poll workers, ballots altered, software 'errors' (that seem to favor one
party about 100% of the time) ...
It is too much.... I have seen a few poll workers arrested for trying to slide multiple
votes through a machine - and I though 'well just few votes won't matter' - but now... the
Trust is broken...
If anything good can come of all this - I hope the "Voting Process" is overhauled 100%...
maybe even to the level of BlockChain.... Bullet2354 Mike •
a day ago
My concern is not the actual count... however.
My concern is that Voter Laws were abused... significantly.
illegal votes counted, illegal processes used - a really corrupted vote system..... The Law
was not followed.
2016 MI was bad enough with the failed RECOUNT.... Detroit has always had massive counting
errors, bribery scandals, constant inconsistencies, pay to vote schemes, 'walking around money'
- and the STATE has know this for 60 years! ... yet never moved to fix it. I think it has grown
'out of control' in 2020.
I used to 'give a little' for a few fraudulent votes here or there.... a few Dead people get
a ballot... a few data base errors.
This year - the Fraud has crossed the line.
I don't trust the count. - VOTE INTEGRITY HAS COLLAPSED.
By Graham Hryce , an Australian journalist and former media lawyer, whose work has been
published in The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Sunday Mail, the Spectator
and Quadrant. It's only when you compare what is happening in America to the likes of
Australia, which also recently held elections, that you appreciate just how alarming the
situation in the US is. Civil war is a real possibility.
Despite the fact that America and Australia are both liberal democracies sharing a common
cultural heritage, key aspects of the US presidential and congressional elections appear
extraordinary from an Australian perspective.
To paraphrase Tolstoy: all happy democracies may resemble one another, but every unhappy
democracy is apparently unhappy in its own way.
In recent months, elections have taken place in three Australian states and territories. In
each of these contests, the incumbent government has been returned with an increased majority,
while in America, President Donald Trump has been narrowly defeated by Joe Biden.
Leaving aside the disparate results, the following important differences between the
Australian and the American elections are clear: Firstly, the comparative irrelevance of
Covid-19 as an issue in the American election. Secondly, the dominance of a crude populist
pro-capitalist ideology (favouring business interests and profits over lives) in the American
electoral contests. And finally, Trump's predictable and completely unprincipled response to
his defeat.
These differences augur badly for the future of democracy in America – in fact, they
indicate that it may be in its death throes. In Australia, however, recent events have
strengthened democracy, enabling a perspective to emerge which comprehends the disaster that
may be about to engulf the US.
The outcome of the recent elections in Australia turned on the issue of how incumbent
governments had handled the pandemic. Australia is a federal polity, comprising six states and
two territories, with a population of some 25 million. To date, it has recorded 27,000 Covid-19
cases and 900 Covid-19-related deaths – one of the best outcomes of all Western
democracies. America, by way of contrast, has seen 10 million cases and chalked up over 250,000
deaths.
Australia's remarkable result has been achieved by an early federal government closure of
national borders, strict state government lockdowns and the closure of state borders.
Each of the recent Australian elections was fought on the coronavirus. The Queensland result
is the most instructive. The state's Labor government imposed strict lockdowns and closed its
borders very early on in the pandemic. The conservative parties opposed this, and the two
Trump-like populist parties – One Nation and the Palmer Party – spent the election
campaigning for the immediate lifting of all restrictions and opening of the state borders.
Last week, the Queensland Labor government was returned to power with an increased majority,
and the One Nation and Palmer Party populist vote – primarily the vote of an older
demographic – collapsed and crossed over to Labor.
The situation in America could not be more different. Trump refused to adopt a national
policy to deal with Covid-19. He ignored and/or minimised the risk of the spread of the virus,
promoted untested cures and belittled the advice of his own public health experts. He also
consistently opposed all lockdown measures and other efforts by state governments to control
the pandemic, and blatantly lied to voters, telling them that the virus was under control when
it has continued to spread at an alarming rate.
Despite all this, Trump only narrowly lost the presidency, and, more astoundingly, the
Republican Party easily retained control of the Senate. The 'blue wave' in favour of Biden and
the Democrats – predicted by almost all pollsters – did not
materialise.
One explanation for the relative unimportance of the coronavirus in the US elections is the
dominance in America of a crude pro-capitalist ideology that favours the interests of business
and the economy over the health of the American people. This ideology has political adherents
in all Western democracies (including Australia), but only in America could mainstream
politicians fervently embrace it and hope to win office.
And Trump and the Republican Party did this when the Covid-19 second wave was sweeping
through Europe, compelling political leaders there (including conservatives like Boris Johnson
and Emmanuel Macron) to reintroduce strict shutdowns and other measures to deal with it.
Fifty years ago, the historian Louis Hartz, in the Liberal
Tradition in America , portrayed America as a nation trapped in a liberal, pro-capitalist
ideological straitjacket that prevented it from dealing effectively with the social and
economic challenges that confronted it. Hartz's analysis seems even more relevant now than it
did then.
The most extraordinary aspect of the US election, however, has been Trump's – and the
Republican Party's – refusal to accept defeat. It is this that portends, more than
anything else, the demise of American democracy.
Not surprisingly, Trump has reacted to his defeat by alleging that Biden "stole the
election" by means of widespread electoral fraud. Trump maintains that he won the election.
Even before the counting of votes had concluded, he commenced a number of legal actions –
most of which are doomed to failure – challenging the results in various states.
Donald Trump Jr.
urged Republican supporters to "go to total war" to keep his father in office.
Trump's former adviser, Steve Bannon (who is currently facing criminal charges)
called for the beheading of senior public health officer Anthony Fauci and the FBI
director, Christopher A. Wray.
Powerful Republican politicians, including Senator Lindsey Graham, have vigorously supported
Trump's response to his defeat. Newt Gingrich, the former Republican powerbroker, predicted
that Biden's victory would generate a build-up of rage that would keep Trump in power.
Republican Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis has
urged members of the Electoral College – whose votes determine the outcome of the
presidential election – to break with convention and give their votes to Trump, despite
the fact that voters in their states preferred Biden. This unprecedented suggestion, which has
not been disavowed by Trump and his supporters, constitutes a serious attack on the mechanism
at the heart of the US presidential electoral process.
It also offers Trump a way to stay in power – because if the Electoral College does
not conclude its deliberations by mid-December, it falls to the Republican-dominated Congress
to decide who becomes president.
Trump and the Republican Party have plunged America into an extraordinary political crisis
that will not be resolved for some time. Trump will not voluntarily give up office, and it is
uncertain how this impasse will be resolved.
The president's response to his defeat has astounded conservative Australian politicians.
When asked to comment this week, Prime Minister Scott Morrison could only say that he was an
observer of and not a participant in the US democratic process. Some of his colleagues,
however, have been severely critical of Trump.
More ominously, the Covid-19 pandemic is intensifying dramatically in America, with 100,00
new cases now being recorded each day, along with 1,100 deaths. This ongoing health crisis can
only exacerbate and intensify the current political crisis.
At the weekend, we saw protests in major American cities. Most disturbingly, armed Trump
supporters massed outside an Arizona voting centre in an attempt to stop the count. Such events
could become more common as the political crisis intensifies. It is inevitable that both sides
of the intractable political and ideological divide in America will become increasingly more
irrational in the coming months.
It is all very well for the Democratic Party elites to criticise Trump and his supporters
for believing in conspiracy theories about the pandemic and mass electoral fraud. But these
elites have themselves been peddling equally irrational views about catastrophic climate
change, critical race theory and identity politics for decades. After all, whose world view is
really more irrational, Trump's or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's?
Joe Biden's
victory speech on the weekend was predictable and bland. It is all very well to announce
"a time to heal" and tell Americans "to remain calm and patient" and that "the
purpose of our politics is not unending warfare." But these are just meaningless platitudes
in the current circumstances.
Whatever happens, Biden will not be sworn in as president until January 20 next year. He
cannot begin to deal with the pandemic until then, when it will be too late, nor can he do
anything about the civil unrest that will engulf America. And even if Biden does take office as
president in January, the Republican-dominated Senate will no doubt block his entire
legislative program – such as it is.
America today is in a very similar position to that which it was in in the 1850s in the
lead-up to the Civil War. It is deeply divided over fundamental issues of principle, which have
calcified to the degree that rational debate is no longer possible. The political system,
previously based on compromise, has become so ideologically divided that compromise is no
longer possible.
In such circumstances, civil war becomes a very real possibility. But any coming war will be
very different from the American Civil War of the 1860s. That war was fought, in effect,
between two nations with regular armies.
The coming civil war in America will be a disorganised bitter social conflict fought in
cities by armed groups of citizens on the barricades, much like the European revolutions of
1830 and 1848 – with one important difference. The insurgents in the European revolutions
were fighting for democracy – whereas the participants in America's coming civil war will
be engaged in a war to destroy it.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
So neoliberal Dems gaslighted everybody with Russiagate for four years, staged Ukrainegate,
and now cry for unity. Funny, is not it
For four years, Democrats branded Donald Trump an illegitimate president and treated him as
such. Then-President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden plotted with FBI Director James Comey a
way to oust Trump's pick for national security advisor, Michael Flynn.
Now they face the results of the attempt to depose Trump via color revolution (aka
Russiagate), the result of neo-McCarthyism hysteria and cry uncle. To paraphrase Tolstoy: all
happy democracies may resemble one another, but every unhappy democracy is apparently unhappy in
its own way.
Wayne Dupree has been to the White House to talk to President Trump about race relations
and appeared at election events for him. He was named in Newsmax's top 50 Influential
African-American Republicans in 2017, and, in 2016, served as a board member of the National
Diversity Coalition for Donald Trump. Before entering politics, he served for eight years in
the US Air Force. His website is here: www.waynedupree.com . Follow him on Twitter @WayneDupreeShow
I've participated in eight elections including this one, and I've never before witnessed the
open hostility and vitriol that's been aimed at President Trump.
No president was ever abused like Trump was from day one. The Republicans didn't cooperate
with Barack Obama at all, but any thinking person can see the difference between the way Obama
was treated and the way Trump has been treated. The past four years have set a dangerous
precedent, and you know what they say about karma.
Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer refused to work with President Trump
on anything, but now the socialists want the Republicans to work with them. Interpretation: we
want the Republicans to work with us as long as they believe everything we believe and do
everything to help us, even if, in their eyes, it destroys America. No dissent will be
accepted.
You really have to wonder about this arrogance from the Democrats and their call for unity,
don't you? Joe Biden is calling for unity because he doesn't want to face the constant
scrutiny the Trump administration faced. After all, do you think the hundreds of millions he
received in campaign contributions didn't come with strings attached?
Right now, there's not enough critical thinking for unity to happen; our emotions govern too
many of us. The media have played on that for four years. They convinced millions of
Americans they would have to be insane to consider re-electing Trump, even though most
Americans are sick of the establishment politicians and their big empty promises, sick of their
endless and expensive foreign wars, sick of a sluggish economy, and tired of the outsourcing of
American jobs.
How can unity happen when the rift between liberals and conservatives is larger than ever,
and the two sides envision this country's future in vastly different ways? How will half of
the American population ever again trust their sources of news and information when nearly
every outlet has lost all pretense of objectivity? Every bit of reporting has become an opinion
piece.
In marriage, they call these irreconcilable differences. It may not happen in my lifetime,
but this country would do well to consider a peaceful separation.
Our national media have failed us. And that's all media, including social. They caught us
all hook, line, and sinker. Why? Money. We are such a gullible species. The more people hear an
idea promoted, the more it sounds true. This is why our country is divided. We rely too heavily
on our media for information, true or not. They manipulate us with their words like modern-day
bards. Journalism is indeed dead, and it's been replaced by sensationalism. But it all boils
down to who's really at fault. To find that out, look in the mirror. Yes, we all let this
happen to us.
I wouldn't blame people for believing phony news. Think about it: why do companies spend
literally billions of dollars on commercials? Companies use commercials to change our buying
habits, and they work extremely well on a subliminal level. Likewise, the mainstream and
social media use misinformation, distortions, deceptions, and omissions to change people's
voting behavior on that same subliminal level. The only way to ensure legitimate elections in
the future is to destroy mainstream and social media's hold on our country.
In the past four years, the behavior of the Democrats has been that of junior high school
bullies with no adult supervision. What all men want most is power, and the Democrats will do
anything to get it. We can't take their low road, but should stand against their further
attempts to turn this into a one-party nation. We need a broad spectrum of ideas to keep our
country strong and our citizens cared for.
One party does not have all the answers, nor can they dictate to the other parties how to
worship, think, or even eat. When I was young, I was a Bill Clinton Democrat. I walked away
before the Obama administration and never looked back. I believe more and more people are doing
that, and, by the 2022 midterms – well, watch out, Dems!
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Russia has consistently stressed its willingness to work with either candidate -- late last
month, the Kremlin's press secretary Dmitri Peskov rebuffed suggestions that Moscow prefers the
incumbent: "it would be wrong to say that Trump is more attractive to us."
But Russia's political commentary sphere has proven more polarized. Some cite
Biden's readiness to extend the New START treaty without additional conditions as evidence that
Biden is someone that the Kremlin can do business with; others have expressed concern over the
Democratic candidate's "Russophobic" cabinet picks and predict that, under a Biden presidency,
Washington's policy of rollback will escalate to an unprecedented level. But there is also an
overarching belief that Washington's Russia policy is so deeply embedded across U.S.
institutions that not much is likely to change in U.S.-Russian relations.
As Peskov put it, "there is a fixed place on the altar of US domestic policy for hatred of
Russia and a Russophobic approach to bilateral relations with Moscow." Still other commentators
are interested in the process as much as the outcome, drawing attention to ongoing mass unrest and
allegations of electoral misconduct in order to argue that Washington has forfeited its moral
authority to lecture others on proper democratic procedure and the orderly transition of
power.
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, analysts on both the left and right noticed that
President Trump had the potential to grow his base of white working-class voters. Five
Thirty-Eight's
David Wasserman noted that over 44 million non-college-educated white voters who were not
even registered to vote before the 2016 election concentrated heavily in the Midwest, including
2.6 million in Pennsylvania, 2.2 million in Ohio, 900,000 in Wisconsin, and 500,000 in Iowa.
All the Trump campaign needed to do was locate them and register a fraction of them, and it
would be smooth sailing till election day.
Rather than employing a strategy that looked to find the missing white working-class voter,
the Trump campaign devised a plan to drive support from minority voters. They released both the
Platinum Plan for black Americans and the American Dream plan for Hispanic Americans, promising
hundreds of billion dollars to revive their communities and a series of other identity-driven
policies.
This was successful to a point. The Hispanic turnout in Florida and Texas were large enough
to deliver Trump a much larger victory than most people expected and helped keep Arizona and
Nevada competitive even as he shed voters in the suburbs and among Independents as well as
college-educated whites. Among black voters, exit polls showed Trump received 19 percent of the
black voters between 25 and 44 years-old. However, he didn't budge the number of older black
Americas who make up a majority of voters in their racial group.
That plan was always doomed to fail due to the small share of minority voters in the Midwest
that were up for grabs. There weren't enough Hispanic voters or black Americans willing to flip
to the GOP in those states. So they relied on their pool of existing voters and resting their
fate on a ground game.
To the Trump campaign and the Wisconsin Republican Party's credit, they ran a fantastic
operation in the state. The President's campaign increased his support and turnout in 22 of the
23 counties he flipped from President Obama in 2016. Even more astonishing, only two of those
counties had turnout under 90 percent. Some counties like Price, Marquette, and Pepin had close
to 95 percent turnout.
In the county of Kenosha, which saw race riots and acts of violence from Black Lives Matter
supporters and members of Antifa, Trump increased his margin from .3 percent in 2016 to 3.2
percent in 2020, becoming the first Republican to win the county in back-to-back elections
since 1928.
The ground game and high level of support from working-class white counties couldn't make up
because the missing white vote stayed missing. In the 23 Obama-Trump counties, the number of
registered voters declined by nearly 8,000 voters from January 2017 to November 2020 even
though the population increased in these areas.
So Trump's campaign had to work harder with a smaller group of people. Most of the
non-college-educated white Wisconsinites that didn't vote in 2016 remained untapped in 2020.
For over three years, the campaign spent hundreds of millions of dollars chasing phantom voters
in deep blue states like New Mexico rather than looking at their natural base sitting
underneath their nose.
Had those funds been redirected to registering and turning out between five and ten percent
of those non-college-educated white voters they missed in 2016, they wouldn't have to worry
about suburbanites defecting to Biden. Fears of voters fraud or illegal vote count wouldn't
have been a concern if they just reached out to their natural constituency.
There's a good chance that the same story could be told in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and
Minnesota. This election wouldn't have been close if they only worked on registering the people
most likely to vote for them, rather than banking on minority voters who just weren't in the
Rust Belt.
As a boomer, I learned very early how evil and corrupt the democrat party can be. Never
voted for a democrat traitor my entire life. Maybe get a little experience under your belt and
you'll learn. Unless you're already a straight up Commie.
As Tucker said it's fact that Detroit and Philadelphia have a history of rigging elections.
doesn't prove they're doing it this time, but people worried about it are as far from crazy as
it gets.
Why are Democrats descending into entitled rages at demands for transparency, or even just
explanations of what they are doing? We told to be patient with the mail-in vote for weeks,
then they are totally impatient and seething outraged hatred with working through our concerns
about fraud. Their protesters are already taking to the streets chanting "count every vote,"
which is where Trump's slogan, "every legal vote" comes from. Did they have the same emotional
outbursts in the past times when we know for a fact they were rigging urban elections?
The white men who failed to vote for Trump in this election are incapable of grasping the
concept of 'Incrementalism'.
How do you think the Frankfurt School's virulently anti-White Cultural Marxists managed to
achieve the success that they have achieved since the 1960s? These subversive termites did
not go full bore and try to shove their anti-White, anti-Western agenda down the throats of
an America that, at the time, was still almost 90% White European. Instead, they began their
steady 'march through the institutions' using stealth tactics – relying on
incrementalism. One tiny step at a time, so as to not alert their target of destruction
– White Americans.
Trump is not the savior of White America – he proved that over the last 4 years.
But, he was a step in the right direction and these White males who were not 100 percent
satisfied by his performance while in office lack the intelligence and patience that is
necessary for TeamWhite during this fight for our very survival.
Our objective is to make sure that the Trumpism – populism, nationalism, rejection
of globalism, rejection of massive third world immigration into the USA, and a cessation of
fighting endless wars for Israel's sole benefit – these concepts must not be dumped by
the GOP. If a Republican politician starts spouting globalism – or supporting amnesty
– or calling for more wars – he or she needs to be thrown OUT of office as soon
as possible and replaced by a Trumpist candidate.
Brad Griffin is an extremely low IQ, dangerously clueless, checkers playing retard who is
too stupid to comprehend the strategy of the anti-White enemy and he thinks he can throw a
hissy fit and somehow boost the amount of respect that other pro-White people have for
him?
It is due to sanctimonious morons like him that the White race is in the existential
crisis situation we now find ourselves in. These 'absolutists' and 'purists' are going to be
the death of our race of people.
By the way, there have already been observations elsewhere on the fact that White men
supported Trump less than before. Not a revelation.
I had no idea if he would lose White men prior to the election, but I thought it a
possibility. I'd see him stand up there at rallies in front of a massive sea of White people
and he'd start bragging about all the shit he'd done for Blacks, Hispanics, and Women, but
nary a mention of White men.
And what's with his hangouts with Kanye West? Saying he's the least racist person in the
room. And the Platinum Plan? Is this shit why we elected you, chief?
I guarantee that no White men were thrilled to hear about blacks being let out of jail.
The more blacks in jail, the better. They need to be kept where less of them can procreate.
If I were POTUS, I find out which crimes black women were good at and increase the penalties
for those, so we could lock up the breeders.
The Amerikastani Empire, no matter who controls it, may have lost the hypersonic missile
war. So what? They're very effectively using the second method to wage war against Russia,
which is strangulating it steadily because of the neoliberal capitalist Putinist regime's
famous "restraint".
Russia is increasingly surrounded by enemies and the more it exercises "restraint" the
worse the situation gets for it. I do not see a "Harris" (it would actually be a Killary
Clinton) regime make any difference to that at all.
"To be sure, it was Russia's intervention in Syria in 2015 that sealed the deal, proving
that the US did not have the omniscient capability to launch attacks anywhere, anytime
without impunity – '
Ad homenims against Martyanov fail to persuade me that Martyanov's views are in error. I
am disappointed to see such tactics, as they imply that his logic and assessments are
valid.
However I believe you have not addressed my central point. That is that a politically weak
unconsented naif "leader" is classically prone to make war for domestic "authority". Wars can
be lost.
Collapse of Empire often is attended by military defeat. Harris would be terribly tempted
to try to prevent defeat by any means.
So, obviously, would the mooted opponents some of which my colleague has named for us as
Russia.
President Putin has explained what happens if Russia is attacked by the US. "No one would
survive".
To repeat. The essential feature of Harris is weakness, that tends to a pattern of war,
which, at every step, is liable to catastrophic failure.
Anatol Lieven
explains how strategic empathy is supposed to work:
This kind of empathy has very valuable consequences for foreign policy. It makes for an
accurate assessment of another state establishment's goals based on its own thoughts, rather
than a picture of those goals generated by one's own fears and hopes; above all, it permits
one to identify the difference between the vital and secondary interests of a rival country
as that country's rulers see them.
A vital interest is one on which a state will not compromise unless faced with
irresistible military or economic pressure. Otherwise, it will resist to the very limit of
its ability, including, if necessary, by war. A statesman who sets out to challenge another
state's vital interests must therefore be sure not only that his or her country possesses
this overwhelming power, but that it is prepared actually to use it.
American policymakers are notoriously bad at understanding how other governments perceive
things and the reasons why they act in the way that they do, and we have seen on many occasions
how this failure to understand the other side's thinking has led us into one crisis after
another. Our leaders often fail to grasp that they are threatening another country's perceived
vital interests, because they frequently deny that the other government has any legitimate
interests at all. Instead of trying to see an issue from the other side, our leaders will often
insist that there is only one acceptable way of seeing it and it is invariably the same as
ours. If the other government responds angrily to this approach, they are then deemed hostile
and "revisionist" rather than a normal state reacting as any other state would. Practicing this
kind of empathy does not mean agreeing that the other government is right, but it does mean
acknowledging what their actual position is rather than projecting one onto them.
H.R. McMaster likes to talk a lot about practicing strategic empathy, but in fact he refuses
to understand how other governments see the world. He prefers instead to imagine that they are
all driven to achieve ideological, expansionist goals just as he is, and then he warns about
the aggressive intentions that he has imputed to them. This is exactly the opposite of what
Lieven is talking about, and it is nothing more than reading his own hawkish inclinations into
everyone else's worldview. If McMaster were willing to see things as the Russian government or
Chinese government did, he would understand that they perceive aggressive U.S. foreign policy
since the end of the Cold War as a threat, and at least some of their conduct over this same
period has been in reaction to American overreaching. But McMaster doesn't understand this at
all. Instead, he insists that the behavior of other states has nothing to do with U.S. actions
whatsoever, because to admit this would be to acknowledge that an interventionist foreign
policy can create more problems than it solves.
Lieven points out how this lack of empathy has particularly poisoned our dealings with
Russia over the last thirty years:
Straightforward Western prejudices (now dignified with the abominable euphemism of
"narratives") are part of the reason for these false perceptions derived from the Cold War.
The collapse of Communism, however, also led to a growth in Western hubris that led Western
policymakers to fail either to listen to their Russian colleagues when they stated Russia's
vital interests, or to study Russia in sufficient depth to understand that they were not
bluffing but really meant what they said. Instead, you had the tragicomic picture of American
officials lecturing Russian officials on the "real" interests of Russia.
This failure to listen and failure to understand account for a lot of the deterioration in
U.S.-Russian relations. While Russia has contributed to this deterioration, the U.S. has
repeatedly taken actions that our government knew would be perceived as provocations and
threats and went ahead with them anyway. Promoting NATO expansion and promising that Ukraine
and Georgia would eventually become members were some of the big provocations, but beyond
specific issues there is the overarching conceit that Russian interests end at their border
while ours are seemingly limitless. If we were in their position, we would have found this
intolerable as well. Eventually, Russia was bound to push back, and that is what it has been
doing for the last twelve years. Predictably, the pushback has been interpreted in the West as
irrational aggression, and this is just more of the same failure to understand why other states
act as they do.
If we would avoid unnecessary crises and clashes with other states, especially nuclear-armed
major powers, our government has to begin paying closer attention to what other states say
their vital interests are. There needs to be an understanding that the U.S. cannot cajole or
sanction them into giving up those interests, and these interests will always matter far more
to them than they do to us. Our leaders need to start understanding that and then adjusting our
policies accordingly.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC , where he also keeps a solo blog . He has been published in
the New York Times Book Review , Dallas Morning News , World Politics
Review , Politico Magazine , Orthodox Life , Front Porch Republic, The
American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week . He holds a PhD in
history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter .
Note that an ICBM is not an easy target. In the "boost phase" in can be launched somewhere
near place where the borders of Russia, China and Kazakhstan meet, thousands of kilometers
from any NATO (or allied) installation. Up there in vacuum, ICBM may be decoyed with aluminum
foil balls or something like that. But when landing their course can be accurately calculated
and intercepted (at least, plausibly so). Note that an ICBM is damn fast, so you need to send
a fast missile.
Here LITERALLY comes a twist. Construct a warhead with ability to zigzag while landing.
Turns at that speed (7km/s?) are a technological challenge, but you do not need to turn a lot
to make the future precision sufficiently unpredictable. So Chinese and Russians work on
that. As a counter, Americans are working on hypersonic weapons that would be better in
destroying opponent missiles on the ground before launch, that is a more difficult goal and
thus they "are behind".
The bottom line is that Americans spend many billions (annually) on futile programs
forcing Russia and China to spend resources on counter measures. Would Americans, at long
last, develop stealthy accurate hypersonics for the first strike, a conceptually simple
counter measure is to build thousands of launching sites, each with a decoy of a strategic
nuclear weapon (but some with the real things). They would need to reduce the cost per a
decoy site, more precisely, the ratio between the cost of "launching site destroyer" and
"launching site decoy". Notably, current treaties do not allow for that, so Americans rely on
limitations of the current treaties while breaking them one after another.
2. Actual developments like Syria, Ukraine etc. Biswapriya is notably reticent in
description what a better Russian conduct would be, so the criticism of "neoliberal
capitalist Putinist regime" is not convincing. What a better regime could do?
1. Hypersonic missiles will only ever be used in an all out war, de facto WW III. Which is
overwhelmingly the least likely kind of war. Short of that no use of them is going to happen
except perhaps China-Taiwan. They will certainly not be employed by Russia. Can anyone
imagine Putin using hypersonic missiles in response to a trade blockade by Amerikastan on a
par with the Amerikastani trade blockade of Iran?
2. I have already said exactly what Russia should have done, repeatedly and in great
detail, but if you missed it you can see some of it here:
A few years ago I wrote an article in which I had compared Putin's "restraint" against
Amerikastani provocations not just failures in and of themselves, but direct encouragement to
more provocations. Back in 2014, I had said, Putin was so single issue focussed on the Sochi
Olympics that what even the Amerikastani imperialists STRATFOR called the "most blatant coup
in history" played out in full public view in Kiev, without Russia lifting a finger. I had
written that Putin could have sent in two battalions of Spetsnaz, overthrown Obama's Ukranazi
coup regime, reinstated Viktor Yanukovych, and withdrawn, with the clear statement that if
there were any more coups Russia would return and this time to stay. I remember that when the
militias of the Donbass were desperately raiding museums to secure WWII weapons to take on
Ukranazi armoured columns, when Russian military blogs were demanding "Putin, dai prikaz!"
(Putin, give the order!), Putin kept silent. When the defenders of Donbass had to withdraw
from Slovyansk and were nearly cut into two, when the Ukranazis were at Donetsk airport, when
defeat was only a matter of hours, it was then that Putin allegedly did something. What that
something was I'm not clear about. It was certainly not the dispatch of Russian forces, or
else Russian tanks would have been rolling down the Kiev streets in two days. It may have
been finally sending weapons, allowing volunteers to go to the front to fight (including more
than a few brave and laudable Americans; not all of them are brain-dead imperialists), and
possibly limited artillery support. At any rate, when the defenders of the republics crushed
the Ukranazis at Debaltsevo and were well on the way to liberating Mariupol on the Black Sea,
Putin again withdrew support to them, leaving them without a port and stuck in a frozen war
interrupted by sniping and shelling.
...
But let's ignore the people of the two Donbass republics for the moment and look at the
result of this "restraint". Today, Amerikastani B52 bombers and RC135 reconnaissance planes
fly freely through Ukranazi airspace right up to the Russian border, compelling Russian air
defence systems to turn on their electronic defences, exposing their signatures for analysis
and jamming by said Amerikastanis. Ukranazistan, not being a NATO member officially, is even
more valuable to Amerikastan than it would have been as a NATO member, since it can be used
for staging actions that could not involve NATO without risk of a world war. How's that for
"restraint", Putinoids?
In fact, with the one shining exception of the war against Georgia in defence of South
Ossetia in 2008, when Medvedev – not Putin – was president, Russian foreign
policy has always been criminally defensive and reactive, never proactive. In 2011 Russia
permitted Libya to be destroyed, turning an ally into a jihadi hellhole where a slave trading
human trafficking regime and a CIA asset fight for control. In 2015 Syria was on the verge of
collapse when Putin belatedly and reluctantly sent just enough planes and troops to save
Damascus and help the legitimate government of Dr Assad liberate Aleppo, but failed to do a
thing to stop the north and east turn into, respectively, an Ottoman colony and a Kurd
Quisling puppet state under Amerikastani protection. In 2020 in Belarus it was only the
personal courage and genuine popularity of President Aleksandr Lukashenko that prevented a
colour revolution that would have turned the country into another NATO stooge. The same 2020
saw the Putin regime allow the racist right wing "liberal" Alexei Navalny to be sent to
Germany, and predictably a fake "Novichok poisoning" was immediately manufactured to wreck
EU-Russian relations, which were just about beginning to mend, beyond repair.
"...how war is actually fought in the 21st century - by information control, economic
strangulation, colour revolution, and armed rebellion by proxy..."
Wars were fought like that in the 20th, 19th century, etc. probably all the way back in
history. The purpose of such tactics is to avoid direct conflict, to weaken your oponent, to
draw them into expending resources on debilitating conflicts.
Quotes from "The Art of War" (Sen Zhui, 5h Century BC):
"The greatest victory is that which requires no battle"
"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war
first and then seek to win"
The western war against Russia goes back 100s of years.
The point Walter is making is that the US indirect war against Russia is failing and that
the defeated US may seek to "win" by going to a direct conflict with Russia and that a week
person, Harris, may lack the wisdom to prevent, moderate such desires.
Harris is a weak character and it is believed that she is overly fond (reliant) on
alcohol. It seems obvious that she was originally intended to be the democratic nominee but
despite preplanned set pieces (the evisceration of the "racist" Biden) she messed it up and
disappeared in the polls only to resurrected as Biden's running mate. For some reason it
seems very important to have Harris as the VP.
... so the criticism of "neoliberal capitalist Putinist regime" is not convincing. What
a better regime could do?
I think this is correct.
But it doesn't detract from Biswapriya Purkayast's argument that Russia's advantage in
conventional arms is not indicative of Russia's ability to prevail in conflict with the
Empire which engages in 4th-generational warfare.
My own view is that IMO Russia's "answer" to the Empire's 4-gen warfare has been
demonstrated in Ukraine and Syria and their ability to counter 4th-gen warfare will only
improve via Russia's alliance with economic powerhouse China and the SCO military
alliance.
This is consistent with the consensus view at moa that the Empire has a limited time to
smack-down China and/or break up the Russia-China lovefest.
The old guard wants us to lay down and take it, but this election is far for over. It's time
to fight, and Trump is our man.
Mitt Romney would have conceded by now. John McCain would have conceded Tuesday night.
George Bush would have called it quits, and then invaded Iraq for good measure. Thank God in
heaven for Donald J. Trump.
Speaking late Thursday from the White House, President Trump predicted that, if all legal
votes (and only legal votes) were counted, they would show that he has won the election.
Over the past few days, former Vice President Biden has consistently made similar claims,
without the caveat that votes must be legally cast. As has become the norm when conservatives
voice concerns over a questionable election, the president's observations and forecast were
quickly "fact-checked" by the mainstream media and censored by Big Tech platforms -- while
Biden's went unchecked.
The facts, we are told, show a clear Biden victory. Any suggestion to the contrary, any
attempt to investigate reports of Democratic misconduct, is dismissed as right-wing
conspiracizing, or the petulant protestations of a sorry bunch of sore losers. (Russiagate, it
seems, has been memory-holed.) The decent thing, they say, would be concession -- take the
numbers at face value and call it a day. To his great credit, it looks like Trump will do no
such thing.
This election has essentially come down to six states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada,
Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Of these six, only Arizona and Nevada really remain question
marks. Michigan and Wisconsin have already been called for Biden by most sources, and
Pennsylvania and Georgia are expected to follow close behind. Even if Arizona and Nevada both
went for Trump in the end -- the latter seems likely, while the former is a long shot --
victory in the other four would secure Biden a comfortable electoral college win at 289. It can
hardly be ignored that the major blue cities in each of these states -- Atlanta, Detroit,
Philadelphia, and Milwaukee -- are all dominated by strong, old-school, Tammany-style machines.
It can hardly be forgotten that urban Democratic machines are not exactly known for the
integrity of their elections.
This is the question being asked by Trump and other right-wingers: not whether some massive
conspiracy has been orchestrated at the national level, with Biden pulling the strings from a
basement in Delaware, but whether the substantial misconduct that has long defined city
political machines is influencing outcomes in these four key locations. This is not a question
on which we can play it safe and civil. We need a full court press to get answers from people
who have shown themselves unwilling to provide them.
Pay attention to the mainstream argument: Trump's claims have not been conclusively proven,
and so the mere suggestion is considered far beyond the pale. For many, the president's
assertion that 1) misconduct has been observed on a large scale in all of these key locations
and 2) this misconduct will be challenged in court, is the conclusive proof they need that we
are sliding into the dictatorship they predicted four years ago. The concerns are rebuked with
the usual dismissals -- unfounded, unproven, unsubstantiated, "without evidence" -- and the
narrative that Biden is the clear winner tightens its grip with every word out of every
anchor's mouth. But more than enough preliminary evidence has been provided in each of these
places to justify -- no, demand -- investigation.
The fundamental reason all these claims remain "unsubstantiated" is that the very people who
reject them on this basis are the ones who are supposed to be substantiating them -- and
they have absolutely, entirely abandoned this basic duty. Anyone who tries to look into the
evidence is denounced as a kook or (in Trump's case) a caudillo. We can hardly expect an honest
accounting of what's happened in the blue cities when talking about what's happened in the blue
cities has suddenly become the eighth deadly sin.
This is why -- besides his unique perspective and approach drawing together the broadest
coalition a Republican has built in sixty years -- Trump is actually the perfect man for the
moment. The entire media establishment is aligned to declare a Biden victory prematurely, with no
intention of investigating election inconsistencies. Local and state governments in the places
that matter are hardly more reliable -- Michigan Attorney General Jocelyn Benson is an alumna of
the SPLC, and Pennsylvania AG Josh Shapiro promised four days before the election that Trump
would not win the state. The docile functionaries and milquetoast figureheads of the pre-Trump
GOP could not have handled the fight ahead -- and likely would have run from it.
In fact, we know that they would have, because that's exactly what they're urging Trump to do
now. If you Google "trump+thursday+speech" or any similar query, it's going to take a whole lot
of digging to actually find the speech Trump delivered on Thursday. What you will find instead
are abundant "fact-checks" of the speech that don't actually check any of the facts, and page
upon page of ritual denunciations by the chattering classes.
These denunciations are hardly limited to the left-wingers behind the anchors' desks at every
major network. CNN is proudly touting a clip of Rick Santorum, former Republican senator from PA
and current senior political analyst at that esteemed news source, expressing his shock and
disappointment that the president would call into question certain aspects of the election.
Santorum voiced his hope that "Republicans will stand up at this moment and say what needs to be
said about the integrity of our election." (The irony is apparently lost on him.)
Similarly, Scott Walker, who was one of the first to exit the Republican primary field in 2016
and lost his reelection bid for governor of Wisconsin in 2018 to Democrat Tony Evers, has issued
a number of tweets insisting that a recount -- which the Trump campaign has already called for --
would be pointless. He has observed that, in normal elections, recounts have done very little to
alter tallies. There's no sense to this line: this is not a normal election. Delays in ballot
counting alone are enough to cause concern. Add to that the occasional full stops, after which
huge quantities of Biden ballots conveniently appear. Add to that Wisconsin's level of voter
turnout -- not over 100%, as some online rumors earlier suggested, but still near unbelievably
high. It would be the farthest thing from a surprise if a more careful inspection really did
shake things up this time around.
The same is true in Michigan, where Biden has made similarly stunning gains in witching-hour
ballot dumps. On top of that, the transposition of a few thousand Trump votes to Biden in Antrim
County has now been chalked up to a glitch in the tabulation software -- software that happens to
be used in 46 other counties. We now know there is a problem with the way the votes are
counted, and even the slightest chance that even the smallest repetition of that glitch has
occurred elsewhere demands the strictest scrutiny be applied to the Michigan vote.
All this and more can be said for Pennsylvania and Georgia, the two states most vital to the
president's reelection. Pennsylvania in particular is playing fast and loose with mail-in
ballots, and dubious rules changes need to be challenged in court. Philadelphia has a reputation
for machine-style corruption that puts Daley-era Chicago to shame. Election workers there have
also repeatedly blocked GOP poll watchers from observing the process they are legally entitled to
oversee. The same thing is happening in Detroit, where cardboard has actually been placed over
the windows to prevent people from seeing inside the central counting location. If you have
nothing to hide, right?
The president has every reason not to take the narrative at face value. This doesn't mean we
throw out the election, and it doesn't mean we're undermining democracy. It means we need to
exhaust every avenue and turn over every stone. Everything that can be brought before a court
needs to be, and every ballot that raises red flags needs to be explained. Put the screws to
every machine operative from Milwaukee to Atlanta, and make sure every word holds up.
Somebody needs to give a very good answer as to why the number of ballots left to count in
Fulton County keeps changing every time we go to sleep -- and changing by margins that boggle the
mind. Force the people who run the machines to speak, and see how long their story lasts.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Declan Leary is the Collegiate Network Fellow at The American Conservative and a
graduate of John Carroll University. His work has been published at National Review ,
Crisis, and elsewhere.
The fundamental reason all these claims remain "unsubstantiated" is that the very people
who reject them on this basis are the ones who are supposed to be substantiating them --
and they have absolutely, entirely abandoned this basic duty.
This is such a bizarre sentence. Why would government officials, investigators or
journalists or whoever be duty bound to substantiate the existence voter fraud.
They've basically done the opposite actually, and debunked the claims. Nearly every
single case of claimed voter fraud has been shown to be inaccurate, a lie, simply misleading
and/or a misunderstanding.
"Suitcases" of ballots? Actually it's photography equipment of local news broadcasts. Poll
watchers getting "pushed out" of wards? Because PA law says you are legally only allowed a
set amount of pre-certified watchers in each precinct, who must wear face masks. "Dead
voters" appearing in ballot rolls? Could exist, doesn't matter though because votes are
crosschecked with databases, and even if you died on the way home from dropping off your
mail-in ballot , your vote will be deleted, let alone if you're some potential fraud
voter who died 30 years ago.
In fact, here's a good nice long Twitter thread explaining most of the major accusations
flying around social media:
I'm just going to reply to my own very long post with an addendum:
The example of Detroit is given in the article as if papering the windows over was some
heinous thing. The reason why we have to protect the identity of poll workers is intimidation. We
already have a situation in Fulton County, GA where some enterprising conservatives have
doxxed a poll worker and actually sent the poor man into hiding.
His license plate number was posted onto Twitter, and he is now hiding at a friend's
house, because conservative activists falsely accused him of throwing out
ballots.
You are a liar. You obviously have never actually WORKED an election. I have. Several,
in fact.
I have personally witnessed ballot fraud on a large scale, coupled with utter
incompetence. Palm Beach county, 2012.
I oversaw the correction of 60,000 "defective" absentee ballots. Each correction table
was to be staffed with 1 Dem, 1 Repub, who cross-checked each others work. The corrupt
Supervisor of Elections harassed and threatened Republican workers and monitors. Nasty as
hell. Corrupt as hell. AND SHE NEVER FOLLOWED HER OWN INSTRUCTIONS, AND WHEN CHALLENGED
POLITELY, SHE THREATENED TO THROW ALL REPUBLICANS OUT OF THE ELECTIONS SITE.
I PERSONALLY witnessed CORRECTED ABSENTEE BALLOTS taken to the back where the voting
TABULATORS were, and watched as each ballot was removed from the box, examined, and some
were thrown in the trash can. And I had seen a lot of ballots with Romney marked for
President, with a straight Dem ticket down-ballot races all Dem. This is a BLUE
county.
I reported this, and nothing was done. Cowardly Republicans do this... Nothing. I
often wonder how many other blue cou ties have threatened Republican poll watchers &
workers.
Your slander of decent people means NOTHING, except that you are a liar of gigantic
proportions. Go over to Daily Kos, where you can fellowship with your vile compatriot
scumbags.
I support the view that it is entirely possible for a county full of good people to
lean hard against the "other side" in a hot disputed election. In 2014 and 2016 the
polling place was a strange church miles away; the workers there had a hand-lettered sign
posted that demanded driver licenses as ID, even though State law did not demand that
form of ID alone. This year I was one of the people who were locked out of the voting
process; the details do not matter, but it happened, and I refused to kowtow to the
system to get my registration card renewed. My county went 80% for Trump, so in fact my
lone vote would not have mattered for much anyway.
No doubt some people were denied the right to vote. Historically, the right to vote is
denied blacks and latinos more often than whites. But to make a blanket claim of a stolen
election, just the President, mind you, is an extraordinary claim that demands
extraordinary proof. Trump does not even claim that any of those down ballot Repubs,
candidates who did just fine for themselves, were denied votes. Just him.
If the democrats rigged the election then why didn't they give themselves the Senate?
Why did they lose seats in the House? And why did they not take back a single statehouse?
Trump lost because the DNC opened their arms to the Bush-era neocons from the Lincoln
Project. They're all republicans that voted for Biden and down ticket republicans and now
Biden will be putting them in his cabinet. If the election was rigged then you can thank
the those republicans for betraying their party, but the DNC is incapable of rigging
anything without help from the other side.
Your mistake is conflating "Republicans" and "republican voters." Not the same thing.
Trump was sent to DC to deal, among other things with the "Republicans."
Why didn't they give themselves the senate? A couple of hundred thousand ballots with
a 100% tally for one side were manufactured to influence one election. Only one really
mattered. Several million Americans were impoverished and terrorized all year long to
ensure this result.
In any case, they don't need the Senate -- the "Republicans" will simply roll
over. They always do. Cocaine Mitch is already signaling his intent to do so.
I saw his spokesperson the other day said any Biden cabinet picks will have to be
approved by him. Doesn't sound like Mitch is rolling over at all. We're going to see the
Lincoln Project repugs (Bush era neocons) in his cabinet and giving the MIC a seat at the
table again.
Just another 4 years of Bush/Obama policies. I think we can agree that both
sides lost this election and that's sadly not new either.
Maybe its time the for
"fringes" to unite against the center.
Speaking as a progressive myself, I dont feel like we united as much as we stayed
home. No one in the 2016 election was representing anything we wanted. The only thing
that united us was our hatred of Hillary. ;) hahaha
We can't unify under either established party. I'm talking about really uniting and
taking both out with a real populist platform (healthcare, ending our wars and getting
money out of politics), all things most Americans are in favor of. What do we have to
lose at this point? There's something horribly broken with our government when every 4
years both sides are left frustrated when the will of the people is never represented in
our supposed representative democracy. We gotta try something different.
Fox News has aired video of certified poll observers in philly being prevented from
entering polling places. but keep running interference- its obvious you wouldn't care if
you KNEW fraud had taken place...
Other Murdoch-owned news companies have done much worse! In England, his reporters
spoofed a call from a dead girl's phone, giving her parents false hope. They bugged and
bribed politicians, pretty ugly stuff. Here you go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
Fox News is a subsidiary NewsCorp, peddler of tabloid propaganda , promulgated by an
Australian plutocrat Rupert Murdoch, who is no friend of the USA. He has been ripping us
apart now for decades for his profit, power, and ego. He has made the GOP his b**ch. Note
how recently he has turned on Trump (not that I mind).
Why would government officials, investigators or journalists or whoever be duty bound
to
the existence voter fraud.
What a ridiculous thing to say. Those who claim to "speak truth to power" have as
their function the investigation and reporting of charges of voter fraud.
Instead, they are nothing but rank partisans, licking the government hand that feeds
them, and simply memory-holing anything that might damage their boy or be thought helpful
to their opponents. Liars and frauds, every last one.
simply memory-holing anything that might damage their boy or be thought helpful to
their opponents.
Whatever you want to claim about lefties with "TDS" or whatever you want to label
them, this sentence is literally a word-for-word description that applies to Trump
supporters.
Just endless ranks of simpletons who will thrust off every piece of evidence and
correction to their accusations.
Write out a comment to debunk things being misconstrued, twisted or lied about, and
Trumpists will waste your time blathering and ranting on about "rank partisans" without
even a hint or lick of irony and self-reflection about how their entire post is actually
about themselves.
I can just as easily dismiss you the same way, but the idea that FB, Twitter, CNN, and
yes -- even Fox -- aren't nakedly partisan is ridiculous nonsense. The least you could do
is pretend to understand what got Trump elected in the first place.
Wall St and the MIC work hand and hand with our corporate media, an industry that's
dominated by 6 corporations. They're not liberal nor conservative, they are only
motivated by money and power and keeping the population divided so that they dont unite
and come for them all.
One only has to look at the Citizens United Supreme Court decision to see how far down
the US has fallen. Now a corporation is a person? If that is so, can't they get
20-to-life when they kill someone? Can't they get the death penalty? NO, they can't; but
they can get all the good things that come from that ruling, without any of the negatives
at all.
Not every last reporter is a rank partisan, but many of them prefer the easy route to
a paycheck. Look up Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Tom Engelhardt, and others like them.
There are honest historians like Howard Zinn and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. There are also
honest whistleblowers who get a bad rep, like Chelsea Manning, Eric Snowden and Julian
Assange. There are still a few journalists of the old school in the world. But they have
to be careful less they find themselves charged with treason under an old law, and spend
the balance of their lives locked down 23 1/2 hours per day in a tiny cell in a US
SuperMax prison.
Excellent article. I am very happy Trump is pushing to open up this election to legal
review, public inspection, recounts, bipartisan review of the ballots, process
violations. We were supposed to be patient and wait for the count, why not the recount.
What is the hurry. If he lost, fine, I want to know that, not just trust anti-Trump,
Democratic activist officials telling me that. There are so many oddities - the Biden
surges coming after down time, always so conveniently. Software turning Republican votes
into Democrat votes. The dead voting. Blocking access to GOP observers. Given the
closeness of the results in the key states that are determining the outcome, it is not
that hard to turn things one way or the other.
The state legislators decide when the mail in ballots are counted. For Florida,
Oregon, Colorado they are counted when they come in and are verified as legal votes. For
Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin the legislature decided they could not start
processing the ballots until election day, thus it is impossible get a count of those
ballots before the in person voting was counted.
Barr is asking, "how many people who sent late-arriving mail-in ballots also showed up
to vote on election day?"
It matters because it's the law we all agreed to, and you need to respect the process
to retain the other side's confidence, which your side has not done.
But one thing which may be behind the law is these 100%-Biden ballot dumps that don't
vote for congress. Do you see what's behind Barr's question? Mail-in ballots make ballot
stuffing almost trivial because you can just dump them into the mail. The one problem is
that each envelope has to have a registered voter's name on it, and that name is compared
to who voted in person. To get the mail-in vote counted, and to avoid suspicious
patterns, you need to put a name on there that didn't vote in person. That's much easier
to do after the polls close, and you have collected all the signature books to start
doing the mail-in count.
Maybe they wouldn't have had to skip steps in the process if Trump should have
appointed someone better than DeJoy, and maybe Congress (Republicans in particular)
shouldn't have spent the better part of the last two decades screwing with the USPS.
Delays in ballot counting alone are enough to cause concern. Add to that the
occasional full stops, after which huge quantities of Biden ballots conveniently appear.
Add to that Wisconsin's level of voter turnout -- not over 100%, as some online rumors
earlier suggested, but still near unbelievably high. It would be the farthest thing from
a surprise if a more careful inspection really did shake things up this time
around.
Yeah, what kind of insane ballot-counting system would allow the poll workers to
sleep ? They should be legally required to mainline stimulants until their work is
done! And the only honest way to deliver counts is to transmit each individual ballot one
by one to the state: sending counts in batches must be evidence of fraud! And how is it
possible that after vocally discouraging his voters from voting by mail, there are
relatively few Trump mail-in votes? Very suspicious! Oh and by the way, turnout in
Wisconsin was quite normal:
jeez, it is amazing how uncurious everyone has become...
Uncurious? The uncurious are the people who take videos shared by Steven Crowder, or
whatever right-wing grifter they like, and believe them as gospel truth without verifying
it.
I have literally spent the better part of my precious Friday evening reading and
watching a trove of claimed voter fraud incidents, and I have yet to find a substantially
supported example.
But...duh? You absolutely do have some ballots thrown out in every
election, because they're improperly marked or otherwise somehow invalid. That's not a
conspiracy, that's literally what poll workers have to do. I don't get it, if we think
there are dead people voting (per the above conspiracy) wouldn't we want the workers to
throw them out? Or do we not want them throwing them out? Can't have it both ways!
It doesn't exactly take a brainiac to realize what's happening in the video. The man
on the right is holding a damaged ballot, and reading off the marked selections to
the woman on the left so that she can transcribe the damaged information to a new,
undamaged ballot. You then mark the serial number for the new ballot onto the original,
damaged ballot to keep them together.
And of course, as an extra bonus, the video is zoomed in purposefully to crop out the
bipartisan poll-watchers that are standing right by this duo to make sure that they're
properly transcribing the votes.
This is literally election 101 stuff, but apparently people don't know how it
works.
Come on, you can literally verify or debunk this on the County website. Yes, one claim
going around is that Wards 273 and 274, which was located at the Spanish Immersion School
reported 200% turnout.
Ward 273 had 671 registered voters, and 612 actual voters; Ward 274 had 702 registered
voters and 611 actual voters.
So congratulations, you bought into another easily disprovable lie. I've also seen
claims that the 272nd, 277th, 269th, 234th and 312nd Wards overrated, but you can check
and see that none of that is true either.
And, all of these claims are leaving out an important detail anyways: Wisconsin has
same-day voter registration. It is possible , albeit perhaps unlikely, to have
higher voter counts than number of pre-registered voters because of that.
Ballot harvesting is real:
https://dfw.cbslocal.com/20... This is but one example in my state, and we're also aware of certain places sending
out unrequested ballots. They all deserve jail time.
Let's say I was. Would that make any of the proof I linked untrue? Or is truth only
something that comes out of a party-flag waving conservatives' mouth?
And no, I'm not. I've pretty openly stated multiple times that I voted ASP in the
Presidential race, and both R/D in various spots down the ballot.
Oh, and just in the interest of fairness, there were some conspiracies going
around on the left too on election night. One that I saw was that 300,000 ballots were
undelivered. While yes, many thousands of ballots were likely undelivered, what was
happening wasn't that they were undelivered,
it was that the USPS was skipping scanning the ballots to expedite delivery. That's
why DeJoy likely won't actually get in trouble, because postal branches were
specifically going out of their way to hand-pick ballots and expedite their delivery.
The reason a recount doesn't change anything is because it's just that--a recount.
They take all the ballots that were counted before, and count them again. They're not
looking at whether any ballots should have been thrown out. Fraudulent ballots that were
counted the first time around are counted again.
A recount won't do anything about what the Democrats pulled in Milwaukee.
I also don't understand it. Hasn't the mail-in envelope with the signature and the
voter's name already been thrown away? How will they remove the votes by dead people?
I have heard they're using some procedure intended for ballots that won't scan to
conceal ballots with missing or invalid signatures by copying them at desks that are
supposed to have bipartisan teams. I guess they throw out the original ballot when they
do that to prevent the recount from checking signatures properly?
I guess they throw out the original ballot when they do that to prevent the recount
from checking signatures properly?
No, they do that to prevent any possibllity of the original being mistakenly counted
twice.
As you yourself pointed out, the copying takes place in front of a bipartisan team of
watchers. So for your fantasy to have any validity, you have to believe that BOTH parties
are conspiring together to rig the vote. In which case, your vote is irrelevant, anyway,
right?
If you really care about this, then instead of believing all of these ridiculous
conspiracy theories, why don't you try to actually become educated about how the process
works, and next time volunteer yourself to become a certified poll watcher? Then you will
KNOW the truth.
Those checks were made before the ballot was accepted and counted. They include
checking that it was a legal ballot sent to a specific person. And that the signature
matched that of the registered voter. Only after those checks is the ballot removed from
its envelop. While there may be a few mistakes there aren't anywhere enough to be
material to the final results. The ballots from in person voting are similarly
dissociated from the voters' information.
A big thank you to Mr. Maheras commenting below. Listen to him. He is our savior.
I am close to 80 years old. Old conspiracy advocates began to make extraordinary
claims about most everything when photographs would appear in newspapers. Rorschach
tests. Then came videos , or movie clips on TV. Think the Kennedy tape. Pretty soon we
had personal video equipment. And now cell phones. All Rorschach tests. But those crazy
conspiracies were the fringe long time ago. True belivers. Ideologues. But not the
Republican party leaders.
About 30 years ago the new world order, illuminati, the Bilderbers, now the Davos all
became the subject of the go to conspiracy advocates. Take your pick. One or all . But
one thing for sure, a cabal is taking over the world. Throw in a few Clinton, or Obama
conspiracies. Catch a sighting of Elvis for good measure.
Now all rolled into the Qanon cabal. Democratic pedophilia scum raping children. What
they all have in common is that they are right wing conspiracy advocates. And they all
are foolish.
This article fits in with those conspiracies. And by right wing
advocates naturally. When Clinton lost , her margin of defeat was similar to Trump's
projected defeat. Clinton and the Democrats never asserted fraud. Nor suggested
conspiracies. The political system worked, Trump won.
Now we have a reputable magazine publishing similar outlandish conspiracy theroies to
the ones mentioned above. All without a scintilla of proof. The President of the United
States for months has been setting his base up to claim fraud. And he has. And they have
blindly bought into it.
Long way to tell you that the greatest disappointment of my lifetime is the validation
by conservatives of these kooky ideas. 30 years ago even conservatives would call these
conspiracy peddlers nut jobs.
Now we have a nut job in the white house. The birther in chief. And he just gets
worse. But no one in the Republican party, except for a few tepid critics, will call the
Predident out.
This is the same guy who saw videos of Muslims dancing on 9/11. Or an inaugural crowd
rivaling the largest gathering of human beings ever assembled in the whole history of
mankind. The greatest. The most perfect and strongest
I have never been so disappointed in my President. He has enabled Mr. Leary to peddle
his nonsense. And tragically Leary believes his blather. This is truly heartbreaking. But
it is the world that Leary and his ilk will have to live with.
Me, l'll be gone. Forgetting my own name soon. Someone tell me that what I just read
is a part of my onset dementia.
Lifelong stutterer? What a load of crap. Just watch some old videos of Joe in his
arrogant days on the senate judiciary. He and his good buddy Ted Chappaquidick Kennedy
didn't stutter when they were trashing Clarence Thomas and Judge Bork. Hey it's your
right to vote for a lifer politician who's way past his prime and suffering from a tragic
disease. Climate change - right. More likely God's judgement on a godless nation.
Now we have a reputable magazine publishing similar outlandish conspiracy
theroies
As someone who started reading TAC a long time ago when it really WAS a reputable
magazine, I'm afraid that particular ship started sailing several years ago, and is
almost out of the harbor by now. There was a time when you could come here to find
intelligent, educated, and thoughtful conservatives setting out their views and being
unafraid to engage with responses from all across the entire political spectrum. Now,
Larison is the only one left who consistently meets that description, a couple of others
dabble in reality once in a while, and the rest are descending into Breitbart levels of
paranoid lunacy.
I look forward to seeing the evidence of fraud in a court of law rather than just
circulating on twitter where the standards are somewhat less stringent.
And the president said BEFORE the election that any election he lost would necessarily
be rigged/corrupt. So of course that evidence was going to be found if he lost.....
You can put this is the same category as all these white guys who lost a job because
they were white men. Of course the couldn't possibly make these claims in a court where
discovery could happen and their BS would be exposed.
1. He is a victim/martyr to his right-wing constituency, in much the same way that Erdogan
has always portrayed himself as a 'man of the people' and representative of the poor
conservative rural Turks and still an outsider in comparison to the secular urban elites.
This 'otherness' or being separate from the establishment/elite/'swamp' is very good for
Trumps' image. Even though he is a billionaire and has been part of the US elite for
decades.
2. With the economy going to go through problems due to covid and other issues, Trump can
try and attribute blame for the then incumbent Biden/Harris regime and free himself of any
blame and say that he has better answers.
3. He may well go on to forming his 'Trump TV' with Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura
Ingraham as is the current chatter amongst some and be seen as the de facto 'leader of the
opposition', a term not really used in the (dis)United States but common in many/most other
countries.
1. The phrase 'Make America Great Again' implicitly acknowledges that America which is
supposedly, 'the greatest country in the world', is not great and hence needs its 'greatness'
restored.
The problem is that the US rose to global hegemony amongst a backdrop of huge industrial
and manufacturing power. Whilst the Europeans were fighting each other on their continent in
WW2, US manufacturing was booming.
Then in the 70s US courts said factories were liable to huge lawsuits for environmental
and medical problems caused by them hence the resultant 'outsourcing' or transfer or labour
to countries with cheaper labour costs such as China, Vietnam, Bangladesh etc.
2. This de-industrialization of the US or at least decimating of its manufacturing leads
to systemic unemployment in the long run. The US is lucky in that it can still flourish with
the reserve dollar, a status it enforces with its global imperial power. However with the
Sino-Russian block seeking to end dollar hegemony the questions are:
- How long will dollar hegemony last for?
- At what pace will it decrease?
-To what point does the US economy experience decline until it substantially impacts the US
itself?
3. The same sort of 'patriots' and right-wingers in the early 2000s who would have cheered
on a US war in the early Bush era and before are now often the most opposed to war. Not on
grounds of altruism but because it doesn't benefit the US, or they themselves see no tangible
benefits whilst the US experiences socio-economic decline.
This trend of economic decline is only going to continue and with it US power.
The US is hardly interested in flexing its - still considerable - muscles in Libya. That
theatre is between the Turks, Arabs and Russians. The US is hardly much of a party in the
tension between Greece and Turkey over their EEZ claims.
This is now replicating itself in the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict where the US has little
power and the main external actors are the Turks and Russians and some others.
Expect this sort of trend to continue whereby regional actors and others will decide on
regional 'solutions' (arrangements) free of the US.
4. As for the US internally, it will experience some sort of internal decline and it will
either:
a: Change itself fundamentally.
b: Experience cessation or 'semi-cessation'. The latter meaning that the states will have a
new deal with the centre, whereby the 'US' can still exist but the states can opt out of
things they don't like.
c: Civil war or internal conflict, think post-George Floyd riots X 10 amidst the background
of far greater poverty in the future.
P.S. In terms of right-wing militias, the military if anything has indicated it is
slightly 'anti-Trump' (the hero of the right-wing militias). The military is a
civic-nationalist, racially inclusive organisation whose current head of the air force is a
black man. This is why in some quarters of the internet some US right-wingers who aware of
this are not so confident about default US backing of any right-wing
The United States is a monopoly two-party fascist system. It is a nexus of profiteering
corporate power, and a two-party cabal of American Exceptionalism. The idea the Democrats are
'commies' is laughable and shows how deeply red the Kool Aid runs. The Democrats just told
the Bernie wing of the Party to shut-up or leave. And why not? The Democrats will tally up a
five million vote plurality over Trump by playing to the right. It got them a President
without a Congress. Thank the "Karen" constituency. Mission Accomplished.
Sure, bring on Tucker as the next Trump, or Don Jr or whatever other celebrity fascist you
want. This particular bell of Pavlov's doesn't work on all the dogs. There is a seething
anti-fascist sentiment out there against for-profit healthcare, politics and war. Before a
4th Reich takes hold in the USA, a Civil War will be fought and the left, verified by study
after study, is more intelligent as a group.
The foreign policy of the USA is fully bi-partisan. Did a Democrat make a peep about the
all the weapons-based 'peace deals' Trump made with the Oil Kingdoms? No. Do the Dems
disagree about regime change anywhere the USA contemplates it? No. Do the Dems want to get
rid of anything but bad manners? No.
So please, knock off the existential BS about Dems 'stealing' the election. Stealing what
exactly? The high ground of plausible deniability? Hilarious.
The result of this election can be summarized with one phase "Strange non-death of
neoliberalism."
Joe Biden win is a win the tech companies, the big banks, Beijing, as well a PMC
class.
likbez 11.07.20 at 5:37 pm ( )
It's entirely possible that Biden will be a 1 term President, and this is something that
Democrats should have given some thought to. But they had other, sillier, things on their
mind, and, well, here we are.
They don't care. It is return to business as usual -- classic neoliberalism with the
classic neoliberal globalization on the agenda. And this is all that matter to them.
The people behind Joe Biden are Clinton classic neoliberals. Who ruled the country since
1990th with a well known result.
It is unclear what will happen in 2020 as Biden is a weak politician clearly unable of
dealing with the current crisis the country faces. He is kick the can down the road type of
guy.
And some start speculate that Dems the might get Tucker Carlson in 2024 as the opponent to
Kamala.
(2) From an American perspective, Republican control of the Senate means that the Dems
have limited scope to carry out grandiose economic and social experiments. Which I doubt
Biden is much interested in anyway. (Incidentally, the idea that Biden or Copmala is in any
way a "socialist" is yet another far-fetched MAGA fantasy just ask the folks at Chapo Trap House ). The idea that he came to
power via fraud will not be quite enough to delegitimize the Biden Presidency – it's
not like George W. Bush's narrow and contested victory over Al Gore in Florida remained
much of an issue after a couple of months – but it certainly wouldn't hurt
Republicans to have that as an additional rhetorical tool.
(3) Most consequentially, this substantially discredits American soft power and its
"democracy promotion" efforts.
Who exactly is Joe Biden , the man who may be
our
president come Jan. 20? The truth is, as of right now, we don't really know.
We have no clue what Joe Biden actually thinks, or even if he's capable of thinking. He
hasn't told us and no one's made him tell us for a full year. In fact, it's becoming clear
there is no Joe Biden. The man you may remember from the 1980s is gone.
What remains is a projection of sorts, a hologram designed to mimic the behavior of a
non-threatening political candidate: "Relax, Joe Biden's here. He smiles a lot. Everything's
fine." That's the message from the vapor candidate.
So who's running the projector here? Well, the first thing you should know is that the
people behind Joe Biden aren't liberals. We've often incorrectly called them that. A liberal
believes in the right of all Americans to speak freely, to make a living, to worship their God,
to defend their own families, and to do all of that regardless of what political party they
belong to or what race they happen to be born into or how far from midtown Manhattan they
currently live.
A liberal believes in universal principles, fairly applied. And the funny thing is, all of
that describes most of the 70 million people who just voted for Donald Trump this week. Most of
them don't want to hurt or control anyone. They have no interest in silencing the opposition on
Facebook or anywhere else. They just want to live their lives in the country they were born in,
and it doesn't seem like a lot to ask. So by any traditional definition, they are liberal.
However, our language has become so politicized and so distorted that you would never know
it. What you do know for certain is that the people behind Joe Biden are not like that at all.
They don't believe in dissent. "You think one thing? I think another. That's OK." No, that's
not them at all. They demand obedience to diversity, which is to say, legitimate differences
between people is the last thing they want. These people seek absolute sameness, total
uniformity. You're happy with your corner coffee shop? They want to make you drink Starbucks
every day from now until forever, no matter how it tastes. That's the future.
Now, if these seem like corporate values to you, then you're catching on to what's
happening. The Joe Biden for President campaign is a purely corporate enterprise. It's the
first one in American history to come this close to the presidency. If a multinational
corporation decided to create a presidential candidate, he would be a former credit card shill
from Wilmington, Del., and that's exactly what they got. What's good for Google is good for the
Biden campaign and vice versa. We have never seen a more soulless project. They literally
picked Kamala Harris as Biden's running mate, someone who can't even pronounce her own name.
Not that it matters, because it's purely an advertising gimmick.
We watched all of this come together in real time. We stood slack-jawed in total disbelief
as a man with no discernible constituency of any kind rose to the very top of our political
system, as if by magic. It's possible in the end that Joe Biden himself never convinced a
single voter of anything over the entire duration of the presidential campaign, but he didn't
have to. Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination because he wasn't Bernie Sanders. He came to
where he is today because he isn't Donald Trump. It's the shortest political story ever
written.
Now, whatever you may think of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, they did it the
traditional way. Each one of them had the support of actual voters. Living, breathing people
loved them, believed in them, vested their hope in them, and, by the way, agreed with their
ideas, which they articulated clearly.
But corporate America hated them both. They couldn't be controlled, particularly Donald
Trump, whose complete unwillingness to submit made him the greatest possible threat. That's why
they hate Donald Trump, because he won't obey.
It's insulting to say that Joseph R. Biden won this election, if that is what comes to pass.
The tech companies will have won. The big banks will have won. The government of China, the
media establishment, the permanent bureaucracy, the billionaire class -- they will have won,
and not in the way that democracy promises. If a single person equaled a single vote, a
coalition like that could never win anything. There aren't enough of them.
But as a group, they have something that Donald Trump's voters sadly do not have, and that
is power. They have lots of power and they plan to wield that power, whether you like it or
not. It's all starting to look a lot like oligarchy at this point. The people who believe they
should have been in charge all along now may actually be in charge.
So what does that mean for the rest of us? Will corporate America declare victory and back
off? Can we speak freely again? Will they take the boot from our necks? Can we have America
back now that the Great Orange Emergency has passed? Well, the mandatory lying orders finally
be lifted?
Those are the questions we'll be paying attention to, since we plan to stay in this country.
And one other thing while we're at it, who's excited to greet our new corporate overlords? Who
plans to collaborate, particularly of those on the right side, the Republican side, the side
that said it was defending you? Who's happy about all of this? That seems worth keeping track
of, just so we know who we're dealing with here. Tucker Carlson currently serves as the host of
FOX News Channel's (FNC) Tucker Carlson Tonight (weekdays 8PM/ET). He joined the network
in 2009 as a contributor.
I think calling it Harris (Biden) administration is a bit childish. Harris will have about as
much effect on policy as Pence had during last 4 four years. Certainly nothing like Cheney.
And she won't be the Dems candidate in four years.
Chris Sweeney, UK reporter, says" Britain died for me, its become a Covid-obsessed police
state."He further writes that the courageous spirit that defines Britain is disappearing. Do
you feel the same about the US. I do. The response to the lockdown and masks etc. sends brave
loggers here in the Catskill into a state of child-like fear . Who said there is a sucker
born every minute.
RSH's warning that Trump could still start a war should be taken very seriously. Trump has
vowed that he will never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Will he leave office without
ENSURING that they cannot?
I don't think for a minute think that Zionist Biden will do anything to upset Israel. But
the election of Biden is a convenient excuse for Trump to start a war (probably based on a
false flag of some sort) that Biden (or Kamala-Hillary) will "inherit".
@ pnyx #43 . . .on Biden. Just think of the warmongering role he played for the Iraq war. The Neocons
would have an easier time with Biden than with Tronald
Yes. Biden is a Clintonite, Trump was anti-Clinton.
The US war in Iraq - Operation Iraqi Freedom - with its death, destruction and displacement
has been rightly called the worst US foreign policy move ever.
The Clintons started it, and then promoted it with Biden's assistance as Chair of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee.
President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act into law on October 31, 1998.
On December 16, 1998, President Bill Clinton announces he has ordered air strikes against
Iraq because it refused to cooperate with United Nations (U.N.) weapons inspectors.
Trump's foreign policies were remarkably different? How? He assassinated an Iranian
general, which nearly had the US enter into a hot war with Iran, bombed Syria twice, put
additional sanctions on Iran, Venezuela, Russia and the DPRK. Trump's State Department has
successfully enacted regime change in Zimbabwe, Sudan, El Salvador, Chile, Honduras, Bolivia
(Mike Pompeo congratulating Luis Arce on his win -- very suspicious), and is trying regime
change in Hong Kong, Belarus, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, Eritrea, and Zimbabwe again, and as
of late, Nigeria.
You could argue that Trump wants Iran to be somewhat stronger so he can sell more weapons
to his MIC buddies and profit that way, therefore he pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, and
the weapons import/export sanctions on Iran expired. But that's a different and more brash
method of managing Empire. It's different from Biden's "strategic de-escalation" policy with
Iran via the Iran nuclear deal, but not that one that necessarily yields better results for
Iran in the long term.
Calm down folks, the elected officials in the US have been puppets of the elite for the
entire history of the country.
The problem we're facing is within the elite community and far above any government's
control.
They didn't legalize drone striking "terrorists" any where on the globe by accident.
This means the elite are terrified of the fact that the internet and Trump both have exposed
them for the morally bankrupt, greedy, mass murdering psychopaths they truly are.
The accidental presidency of Trump made them realize that their useful idiots(elected
officials) where more idiots than useful and that they had to use the state sponsored
monopolies in the press as well as their privately controlled publicly funded covert
community to steer the narrative away from actual reality into their alternative commoditized
version of reality.
Trump was never trying to defend America from the elite for the common man. He was trying
to exploit the elite who had rejected him and his father for decades as well as cash in on
their predicament in order to pay off his debts and start his own reality TV network.
I agree Trump was useful and informative but in the end he, like us is just along for the
ride.
Don't do anything rash and don't for one second think a regime change in America is a rare
occurrence. Remember the Kennedy's ?
The only way to win is to not become one of the elite's useful idiots by lashing out
against another citizen. Poor and middle class only get the illusion they help decide
policy.
The policy is decided and auctioned off within the billionaire funded think tanks and sent to
the useful idiots in DC to be rubber stamped in order to trick you into thinking the
legislative branch is legitimate. These people could f*ck up a two car parade and prove it
over and over again.
Stay sane folks, the motives haven't changed in centuries and the elite are far more
scared of us than they are the other elite's because they all know they're all cowards.
In addition, considering Trump was supposedly a Russian puppet, Congress under his admin
passed a bill which allowed the US to arm Ukraine against Russia even more.
Wonderful and thought provoking analysis of current political affairs b. However I would
like to add that Biden and Trump are the products of political trends that have deep roots in
modern US and world political affairs that have been ongoing for some 100 years or more.
Biden and Trump did not occur in a vacuum. Both are products of the two world wars that were
fought in the last century. More recently, the US since 1940 and continuing to the present
day, has been actively preparing or fighting a major war somewhere on this planet. This
development has in turn created a vast military and civilian bureaucracy that constantly
needs to be fed a diet of real or imagined threats in order to survive.
The world recognizes what U.S. elites don't: the utter, total American failure to contain
Covid-19 has damaged U.S. standing and will do so until the virus is controlled. Meanwhile,
regional powers, China and Russia, cooperate and share resources, particularly vaccines. Cuba
provides treatments, but the U.S. turns up its nose at Cuban medicine, even if it means more
American covid patients die – this, though Cuba's pharmacopeia for this plague appears
superior. China sends doctors and medicines across the globe. Russia opts for sane herd
immunity – through vaccination. These countries act like adults. Not a good look for the
U.S.
The Obama regime's deplorable trade and military "pivot to China," along with its sanctions
against high-ranking Russians and Russian energy, financial and defense firms and the Trump
regime's provocations, sanctions and insults aimed at both countries have now born fruit: There
is talk of a military alliance between China and Russia. Both countries deny that such is in
the offing, but the fact that it is even discussed reveals how effectively U.S. foreign policy
has created enemies and united them. Even if they would have drawn closer anyway, China and
Russia cannot ignore the advantage of teaming up in the face of U.S. hostility. A more idiotic
approach than this hostility is scarcely imaginable. Remember, not too long ago the U.S. had
little problem with its chief trading partner, China, and there were even reports some years
back of actual military cooperation in Syria between the U.S. and Russia. All that is gone now,
dissolved in a fog of deliberate ill-will.
So what are some of the absurd U.S. policies that have reaped this potential whirlwind? An
utterly unnecessary trade war with China, with tariffs that were paid, not by China, but by
importers and then passed on to American consumers. There is the Trump regime's assault on
China's technology sector and its attempt to lockout Huawei from the 5G bonanza. Then there are
the attacks on Russian business, like its deal to sell natural gas to Germany, attacks in which
the U.S. insists Germany buy the much more expensive U.S. product to avoid becoming beholden to
Russia. And of course, there are the constant mega-deals involving sales of U.S. weapons to
anyone who might oppose China, Russia, North Korea or Iran.
Aggravating these economic assaults, the U.S. navy aggressively patrols the South China Sea,
the Black Sea and more and more the Arctic Ocean, where Russia has already been since forever.
Russia has a lengthy Siberian coast, making U.S. talk of Russia's so-called aggressive posture
there just plain ludicrous. And now a NATO ally, Turkey, stirs the pot by egging on Azerbaijan
in its war against Armenia, which has a defense treaty with Russia. Azerbaijan is famous for
the oil fields of Baku.
Never has it been clearer that the U.S. deploys its military might to advance its
corporations' interests, international law be damned. As General Smedley Butler wrote of his
military service way back in the early 20 th century, he was "a high-class muscle
man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster
for capitalism. I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make
Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank Boys to collect revenues in," and on
and on. Nothing has changed since them. It's only gotten worse. Indeed now we're in a position
where it is Russia that abides by international law, while the U.S. flouts it, instead
following something bogus it calls the "rules of the liberal international order."
The biggest and most consequential U.S. foreign policy failure involves nuclear weapons.
Here the Trump regime has outdone all its predecessors. It withdrew the U.S. from the
Intermediate Range Nuclear treaty, which banned land-based ballistic missiles, cruise missiles
and certain missile launchers and which it first signed in 1987. It withdrew from the Open
Skies Treaty, inked in 1992. That agreement allowed aircraft to fly over the signatories'
territory to monitor missile installations.
Trump has also made clear he intends to deep-six the 2010 New Start Treaty with Russia,
which limits nuclear warheads, nuclear armed bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles and
missile launchers. The Trump regime has made the ridiculous, treaty-killing demand that China
participate in START talks. Why should it? China has 300 nuclear missiles, on a par with
countries like the U.K. The U. S. and Russian have 6000 apiece. China's response? Sure we'll
join START, as soon as the U.S. cuts its arsenal to 300. Naturally that went over like a lead
balloon in Washington.
And now, lastly, the white house has urged nations that signed the Treaty on the Prohibition
of Nuclear Weapons – which just recently received formal UN ratification – to
withdraw their approval. The U.S. spouted doubletalk about the TPNW's dangers, in order to head
off international law banning nuclear weapons, just as it has banned – and thus
stigmatized – chemical weapons, cluster bombs and germ warfare. Doubtless the Trump
regime's panic over the TPNW derives from its desire to "keep all options on the table"
militarily, including the nuclear one.
What is the point here? To make the unthinkable thinkable, to make nuclear war easier to
happen. The Pentagon appears delighted. Periodically military bigwigs are quoted praising new
smaller nuclear missiles, developed not for deterrence, but for use. Indeed, scrapping
deterrence policy – which has, insofar as it posits no first use, arguably been the only
thing keeping humanity alive and the planet habitable since the dangerous dawn of the atomic
era – has long been the dream of Pentagon promoters of "small, smart nuclear weapons" for
"limited" nuclear wars. How these geniuses would control such a move from escalating into a
wider nuclear war and planetary holocaust is never mentioned.
Before he assumed office, Trump reportedly shocked his advisors by asking, if we have
nuclear weapons, why can't we use them? Only someone dangerously ignorant or profoundly lacking
in basic human morality could ask such a question. Only someone eager to ditch the
human-species-saving policy of no-first-strike nuclear deterrence but willing to risk nuclear
extinction could flirt with such madness. Later in his presidency, Trump asserted that he could
end the war in Afghanistan easily if he wanted, hinting that he meant nukes, but that he did
not incline toward murdering 10 million people. Well, thank God for this shred of humanity.
Some assume a Biden presidency would chart a different course, but they may be counting
their chickens before they're hatched. Biden has made very hostile noises about Russia, China
and North Korea and has surrounded himself with neo-con hawks. He has so far made no promise to
return to the nuclear negotiating table for anything other than START. Would he try to
resuscitate the INF and Open Skies treaties? Would he end Trump regime blather aimed at
scotching TPNW? Maybe. Or he may have imbibed so much anti-Russia and anti-China poison that
he, like Trump, sees the absence of treaties as a green light for nuclear aggression.
Biden's official Foreign Policy Plan says that he regards the purpose of nuclear weapons as
deterrence, thus endorsing this at best very flawed compromise for survival. That he,
apparently unlike Trump, abjures a nuclear first strike is a huge relief, but how long will it
last? The Pentagon has been very persuasive over many decades of center-right rule and there is
no reason to assume that it will suddenly adopt a hands-off policy with Biden just because he
favors nuclear deterrence. Some military-industrial-complex sachems regard the no-first-use
principle as a mistake. Also, remember, Obama okayed a trillion-dollar nuclear arms upgrade.
Biden was his vp. What about that? This is no minor, petty concern. Russia is armed to the
teeth with supersonic nuclear weapons and China has concluded from U.S. belligerence that it
better arm up too. We are in dangerous waters here. Let's hope they don't become
radioactive.
It seems to me there were a surprisingly large number who voted against Trump for down
ticket Republicans. Looks like the Democrats didn't tie the Republican party to Trump as much
as they should have done.
IMHO Trump voters are "protest voters" -- they are tied to the protest against
neoliberalism, not so much to Trump personally. So many Trump voters are against both Parties:
Both D and R party establishment are neoliberal in economic outlook.
In reality "Trump voters" are ready to vote for anyone who will hold pharma, big Ag,
monopolies, insurance companies, etc accountable for the financial harm they've caused to the
90% of the people. That means that both parties will work like hell to prevent any candidate
like that from getting to the general election. See Dem establishment vs, Sanders and
Warren.
Democrats ran a status quo neoliberal candidate and expected a radical result. That did not
happen.
Both the social 'conservatism' and economic 'progressivism' on offer tend to be welded to
highly unpopular opposites. If you want immigration control (Which is both a social and
economic issue but only framed in social terms effectively) and an end to insane post-modern
SJW identity politics, you're obliged to also vote for people who will further deregulate the
economy and give tax cuts to the wealthy. If you want social democrat politics you're obliged
to vote for people who will further promote insane anti-social solidarity post-modern SJW
politics and unending mass migration that are counter-productive, perhaps fatality so, to
their social democratic agenda. (See AOC and her wishes for literal open borders and full
Nordic-style social democrat welfare state)
The currency of a system of economic redistribution within a democracy is the willingness
of those with resources to give to those without. The 'progressive' Democrats in the US are
hooked on this ideal of expanding welfare but that doesn't empower the poor because they're
depended on those with resources to support taxes to give them it. Industrial policy and
immigration restriction (Both to decrease job competition and to make the recipients of
resource redistribution more sympathetic to those with resources) to actually shift the real
wealth and power in society is far more important.
A synthesis on at least immigration restriction and progressive economic policies like
banking regulations, trade reform and industrial policy would be highly popular and is
entirely open ground to take. In 2016 Trump became the first person to make that offer in
stark form in 40 years and despite all the ammo the media and intellectual class were able to
throw at him, he beat Hilary Clinton. Bernie and Corbyn both understand this synthesis and
have spoken of it in the past but now are trapped in political apparatuses that make any
mention of immigration and the economic and social interests of the native working class
totally impermissible. Worse, they wed them to an ideal of ever expanding immigration that
will rip apart any social solidarity needed for socialist or social democrat policies since
the new group interests of the native working class will be battling the newcomers for social
and economic space.
A great deal of American 'Libertarians' are actually quite community oriented and are
infact just not in favour of their taxes being redistributed to outgroups whom they don't
have any sense of social solidarity with. Ask them what should be done in their community and
they start sounding like Bernie Sanders. They view the Federal government as an alien thing
that will take from them and give to alien outgroups.People will say they're being 'duped'
but I think those people just don't understand that people are born out of ethnic groups not
class groups, ethnicity is more important and we might expect it to be so given human
evolution.
Kadath: The GOP has been silent on the presidential election. As a whole the GOP did well
this election. The GOP interpretation going forward is a mix of Chamber Commerce's financial
and immigration policies mixed with Neocon's spreading of democracy thru bombs and ballot
harvesting. In other words their world is getting righted by the steal. Absolutely no doubt
in my mind the GOP is in on the whole thing. Deep State wins.
$15.00 minimal wage after most small businesses are teetering on the brink due to
lockdowns won't end well. It will end with bankruptcy and unemployment, a preference for
hiring "illegals", or if possible an investment in automation. Why is that so hard to
understand? Nor are you going to get the "rich" with this scheme.
Liberals and progressives have to face the inconvenient truth: Trump is no accident. The
people who still vote for him or even just voted for him for the first time knew what they
were voting for. They are not a majority but a large minority of about 46% of Americans. This
cannot be explained as people duped by fake populism. Trump had four years to make even the
slightest gesture of populism (*) – the minimum wage, infrastructure spending, closing
tax loopholes, whatever. There was nothing and plenty of the opposite. This is government for
the plutocracy by the plutocracy. No factory jobs came back to the rustbelt.
Yet roughly the same percentage of voters still stand by their man. They may claim
otherwise when asked (oh those reliable polls and surveys) but this vote is in no shape or
form economically motivated. Trump's platform is racism and white supremacy and hatred and
that is what his people voted for.
(*) Let's take this opportunity to call out the ugly habit of many journalists to use
populism as a polite synonym for racism. Populism is economic policy benefiting working
people to the detriment of the rich. Or just any policy that materially benefits the lower
strata of society. Racism isn't populism.
I understood perfectly well, because Nate Silver kept insisting on it, that
statistically there was a non-trivial chance that Trump would win
The most interesting scenario now what will happen if Trump lose and Biden (or whoever is
the political force behind him) faces hostile Senate. And possibly both hostile Senate and
the House in 2022.
Blue wave did not happen. That's a fact. And that fact alone makes Biden victory, if any,
Pyrrhic. Putting Biden administration in a very precarious position, worse then Trump in
2016. With the real possibility of launching "Chinagate" against him, using Russiagate
template. A special prosecutor and such.
Epidemic and connected with it recession are not over. Senate is controlled by
Republicans. Relation with China deteriorates and with Russia became outright hostile.
This is the essence of it. When you actually drill down, the things both Democrat and
Republican voters want much the same things and that is more collectivism. They want more
collectivism on social matters and they want more collectivism on economic matters. They want
society back.
Both the social 'conservatism' and economic 'progressivism' on offer tend to be welded to
highly unpopular opposites. If you want immigration control (Which is both a social and
economic issue but only framed in social terms effectively) and an end to insane post-modern
SJW identity politics, you're obliged to also vote for people who will further deregulate the
economy and give tax cuts to the wealthy. If you want social democrat politics you're obliged
to vote for people who will further promote insane anti-social solidarity post-modern SJW
politics and unending mass migration that are counter-productive, perhaps fatality so, to
their social democratic agenda. (See AOC and her wishes for literal open borders and full
Nordic-style social democrat welfare state)
The currency of a system of economic redistribution within a democracy is the willingness
of those with resources to give to those without. The 'progressive' Democrats in the US are
hooked on this ideal of expanding welfare but that doesn't empower the poor because they're
depended on those with resources to support taxes to give them it. Industrial policy and
immigration restriction (Both to decrease job competition and to make the recipients of
resource redistribution more sympathetic to those with resources) to actually shift the real
wealth and power in society is far more important.
A synthesis on at least immigration restriction and progressive economic policies like
banking regulations, trade reform and industrial policy would be highly popular and is
entirely open ground to take. In 2016 Trump became the first person to make that offer in
stark form in 40 years and despite all the ammo the media and intellectual class were able to
throw at him, he beat Hilary Clinton. Bernie and Corbyn both understand this synthesis and
have spoken of it in the past but now are trapped in political apparatuses that make any
mention of immigration and the economic and social interests of the native working class
totally impermissible. Worse, they wed them to an ideal of ever expanding immigration that
will rip apart any social solidarity needed for socialist or social democrat policies since
the new group interests of the native working class will be battling the newcomers for social
and economic space.
A great deal of American 'Libertarians' are actually quite community oriented and are
infact just not in favour of their taxes being redistributed to outgroups whom they don't
have any sense of social solidarity with. Ask them what should be done in their community and
they start sounding like Bernie Sanders. They view the Federal government as an alien thing
that will take from them and give to alien outgroups.People will say they're being 'duped'
but I think those people just don't understand that people are born out of ethnic groups not
class groups, ethnicity is more important and we might expect it to be so given human
evolution.
"The PNAC gang (Biden/Harris is their front) will now "shirtfront" Russia and "get in their
face".
They will escalate until they succeed at their plans.
Trump's escalations were almost entirely symbolic and meaningless, but the PNACer's
escalations will be kinetic.
When Iran is once again forced to retaliate against the empire and missile-strikes some
US assets, the PNAC people will escalate and respond with ten times the violence"
The Middle East has changed dramatically with missile, antimissile, and drone tech
advances in recent years.
In addition, Iran can now buy missile componentry directly from China (and perhaps
indirectly from North Korea). Or missiles themselves. Russia is in a 'strategic alliance'
with Iran. That must be borne in mind.
And Russia (in particular) has been relentless in insisting that genuine disputes must be
solved diplomatically between the parties involved.
Conditions are right for gradual normalisation of the Gulf area, and restorations of
normal trade and restoration of relations. (Russia has certainly greased this track.) Iran
hinted that they must accept certain unpalatable realities, and then we saw Saudi etc formal
re-establishment of relations.
If we accept that USA armed aggressions (they are not 'wars', as declared by Congress) are
primarily economic, designed to sell weapon systems and create conditions for US business
enterprise (and businesses of the piglet followers of the big sow)then illegal armed
aggressions no longer make sense.
The risk far exceeds any immediate, yet alone long term benefit.
Immediate conditions multiply the unviability - Covid's economic effects, and US business
being temporarily slowed down in China due to Mr. Trumps actions. The cost to US consumers of
US tariffs paid by US importers of goods sourced from China doesn't help the US cost of
living.
The US is printing money as never seen in history - as have many countries. Is this the
'social credit' system? Will it 'work'? The experiment is massive, and there is risk
aplenty.
Risk compounded on risk? Is this what American people want from their government, whoever
it is? The hell it is!
Forget linking 'kinetic' with Russia. Sure, bluff and posturing from USA, as they are
stuck in a echo loop of their own making. And the only decent leader capable of pushing
through the echo chamber was carefully excluded from Presidential contention.
Trump is also capable of the breakthrough, although through high risk strategies.
On the face of it, his day is done, he came close to 'getting on with it', but not close
enough.
And most critically of all, the recent experience of the US Military - whose analyses I
suspect are more sober than most realize - will surely demand advice of caution over rushes
of blood to political heads.
Everything is changing.
Some things incrementally, slowly, others quickly.
The pressure, in general, is to peace and trade. But the pressure is built up due to the
US policy change 'fault line' sticking. Eventually it will release, and there will be an
abrupt move forward.
The current outcome of this election, a stalemate, is perhaps the best possible
outcome for rest of the world, not only is showing the world how corrupt, outdated and
illegitimate the US' electoral college system is, but this near evenly divided election
result will creates a space for the rest of the free and sovereign world to take a breath
from continues US assault on them.
Elections results that are determined by courts and lawyering do not have legitimacy or
mandate for at least half the voters in US and very doubtful to the rest of the world. This
was the best outcome possible, for those In the world seeking to become free from American
claws.
The coming internal political instability uncertainty and infighting will weaken and keep
the beast busy for coming years, which by itself should provide opportunity for the rest of
world to participate in world affairs.
With his laughable attempts at diplomacy and general hawkishness, he's certainly in the
runnings for the honor. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks at a press conference at the
State Department in Washington, DC, on October 21, 2020. (Photo by NICHOLAS KAMM/POOL/AFP via
Getty Images) |
12:01 AM
Is Mike Pompeo the worst secretary of state ever? He's been awful, no doubt. However, there
are 69 other contenders for that title.
Among modern secretaries, Colin Powell was misused by George W. Bush, who defrauded the
country in selling the tragically misbegotten invasion of Iraq. Madeleine Albright, her mindset
permanently stuck in Adolf Hitler's world, stands out for her enthusiastic embrace of war for
others to fight. Alexander Haig achieved little beyond claiming to be in charge in the wake of
the assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan. William Rogers was overshadowed by National
Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, who eventually took the latter's position.
Going back a bit further, Robert Lansing helped maneuver the U.S. into World War I, one of
the dumbest, most counterproductive moves in American history. The earlier one looks, the more
circumstances diverge, making any comparative judgment more difficult.
Still, about the best that can be said of Pompeo is that he has not gotten America into any
new wars, despite his best efforts. Most often he has played the anti-diplomat, determined to
insult, hector, demand, insist, dictate, threaten, harangue, and impose. But never persuade.
The results speak for themselves: the administration's record lacks any notable successes that
benefit the U.S, the supposed purpose of an "America First" foreign policy. There was a bit of
good, a lot of bad, and some real ugly.
A solid good was President Donald Trump's most important diplomatic initiative: his opening
with North Korea. Pompeo took over in March 2018, with the first summit already planned. That
initiative faltered the following year at the second summit in Hanoi, which was Pompeo's
responsibility.
Alas, the secretary lost points by apparently doing nothing to disabuse the president of the
belief that Pyongyang was prepared to turn over its entire arsenal with the hope that
Washington would look favorably upon its future aspirations. That was never going to happen,
especially after the allied double-cross of Libya, which yielded its missiles and nascent
nuclear program, and after Trump dumped the nuclear accord with Iran, demanding that Tehran
abjectly surrender its independent foreign policy. The North can easily imagine similar
mistreatment, by this or a future administration.
Washington has also pursued better relations with India, which is a positive. As elsewhere,
however, concern about human rights violations is almost entirely absent from Pompeo's
portfolio unless it operates as a weapon against an adversary. The secretary cheerfully holds
the coat of allied dictators as they jail, torture, and murder. Such is the case with Prime
Minister Narendra Modi, who has abetted if not aided rising religious persecution.
The Abrahamic accords between Israel and Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates were a tepid
good. Improved relations between Arabs and Israelis are useful, though strengthening two
authoritarian regimes is not. The Bahraini Sunni monarchy sits atop a Shia population with the
backing of the Saudi military, while the Emirates, nicknamed "Little Sparta," by the Pentagon
-- as if that's a compliment -- has used its military to commit murder and mayhem against Yemen
in a war of political aggression and economic exploitation. The related negotiations with Sudan
have been worse, using an unjust terrorist state designation to force recognition of Israel,
which will undermine the democracy that has yet to be fully born after last year's popular
revolution.
Examples of bad are far more common. For example, Pompeo has worked to thwart the
president's evident desire to exit "endless wars." Nineteen years of nation-building in
Afghanistan is enough. The U.S. does not belong in the Syrian civil war. Iraq and its neighbors
are capable of and should deal with whatever remains of the Islamic State.
The secretary has played an equally malign role in Europe, undercutting his boss -- and, not
incidentally, the American people -- by working to spend more on, and place more troops in, the
continent, even as Trump pushed the Europeans to do more on their own defense. This is an inane
strategy: Washington should cut defense welfare to states with the capability to protect
themselves and allow them to decide how to proceed.
Much the same policy has played out with America's relationship to South Korea. Japan has
escaped most of that pressure. Yet consider the defensive capabilities against China for Japan
and the region if Tokyo spent not 1 percent of GDP on its military, but 2 or 3 percent. And why
shouldn't it do so, instead of expecting Americans to do the job for it?
The secretary turned human rights into a political weapon, sacrificing any credibility on
the issue. He tears up while criticizing Iran but kowtows to the Saudi royals, who are far more
brutal killers. He is horrified by the crimes committed by Venezuela's Maduro regime, but
spreads love to Egypt's Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who has punished the slightest criticism, and
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is turning Turkey into an autocracy. Pompeo actually introduced a new
initiative in support of unalienable rights with the support of countries like Saudi
Arabia and other assorted tyrannies.
Then there is the ugly. Using sanctions to try starve the people of Syria and Venezuela in
order to force their governments to yield to America is not just immoral but ineffective. Both
regimes have survived much and are not inclined to surrender.
At least Venezuela is a matter of geographic interest to Washington. Syria has never
mattered to U.S. security and Pompeo should have backed the president's effort to bring home
all American troops. Today, U.S. and Russian troops are clashing there over the
administration's bizarre and illegal seizure of Syrian oilfields. Also inexplicable is
reinforcing six decades of failure by tightening sanctions on Cuba; the private business
community there has suffered badly as a result, reducing what was becoming a sharp challenge to
the political authorities during the waning days of the Obama administration.
The fixation on Iran, which appears to come more from Pompeo than Trump, can best be
explained as turning Mideast policy over to Saudi Arabia and Israel. The result of abandoning
the nuclear accord has been nothing short of catastrophic. The Iranians have refused to
negotiate. Instead they ramped up nuclear reprocessing, interfered with Gulf tanker traffic,
attacked Saudi oil facilities, and attacked U.S. bases and the embassy in Iraq. Far from
reestablishing deterrence, as claimed, the secretary was left to whimper and whine that he
might have to close America's embassy in Baghdad.
Pompeo has taken the lead in the administration's shameful policy toward Saudi Arabia,
aiding it in its war of aggression against impoverished Yemen. That nation has been at war
within and without for most of its existence. Riyadh decided to invade to restore a puppet
regime to power, turning typical internal discord into a sectarian war in which Tehran was able
to bleed the ineffective Saudi armed forces, which were armed and aided by the Pentagon. In
this way, the secretary has made the American population into accomplices to war crimes.
Even more foolish geopolitically, Pompeo has matched Albright's retreat to World War II
clichés with a stroll back into the Cold War. Russia is an unpleasant actor but doesn't
threaten American security. Europe is capable of defending itself. Alas, constantly piling on
sanctions without providing an off-ramp ensures continued Russian hostility and a tilt toward
China in that burgeoning struggle. How does this make any sense for America?
Finally, Pompeo has been his blundering, maladroit, offensive self in seeking to launch an
American-led campaign against the People's Republic of China. Beijing poses a serious
challenge, but not primarily a security issue. No one believes that the PRC plans to launch an
armada across the Pacific to conquer Hawaii. The issue is Washington's willingness to pay the
cost to forever treat Asia-Pacific waters as an American lake.
As for other issues, the U.S. needs work in concert with friendly powers. Pompeo has done
his best to drive away potential partners: for instance, the G-7 refused his demand to call
COVID-19 the Wuhan Virus and even allies such as South Korea have remained far more measured in
their relations with China, determined not to turn their large neighbor into an enemy. In what
promises to be a long and complicated relationship, genuine and serious diplomacy, which
obviously lies beyond Pompeo's limited capabilities, is required.
On the personal side, he appears to have abused his position for both personal and
ideological advantage. For example, so committed to showing his fealty to Riyadh, he declared
an "emergency" to thwart congressional opposition and rush munitions to the Saudi military so
it could kill more Yemeni civilians. He then sought to impede a departmental investigation,
pressuring and firing the inspector general. What prompted his determination to so avidly
assist a ruler who is ostentatiously vile, reckless, and even criminal is one of the greatest
mysteries of his tenure.
Tragically, Pompeo proved to be one of the greatest obstacles to the best of the president's
international agenda. In a speech delivered last year in which he claimed to be implementing
the Founders' foreign policy vision, he denigrated diplomacy and its successful fruits, such as
opening up both Cuba and Iran to potentially corrosive outside influences, which is the most
likely strategy to induce change over the long term. This approach would be more in sync with
Trump's desire to deal with countries such as North Korea and Iran.
Indeed, left to his own devices, Pompeo would likely have America at war with Iran and
perhaps beyond -- Venezuela, China, and/or Russia. His belligerence serves the American people
badly. As does his consistent campaign, conscious or not, to thwart the president's brave but
incompetent attempts to escape largely braindead practices enforced by what Ben Rhodes termed
"the Blob," the foreign policy establishment that dominates the field.
The secretary has forgotten that his job is not to push his personal ideological line.
Rather, it is to advance the interests of the American people, with a special emphasis on
defending their lives, territory, liberties, constitutional system, and prosperity. In this, he
has failed consistently. Maybe he isn't the worst secretary of state in history. But surely he
is one of the worst.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to
President Ronald Reagan, he is the author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire
.
No matter who "won" the U.S. election, what will not change is the capitalist organization
of the country's economy.
The great majority of enterprises will continue to be owned and operated by a small minority
of Americans. They will continue to use their positions atop the capitalist system to expand
their wealth, "economize their labor costs," and thereby deepen the United States' inequalities
of wealth and income.
The employer class will continue to use its wealth to buy, control, and shape the nation's
politics to prevent the employee class from challenging their ownership and operation of the
economic system. Indeed, for a very long time, they have made sure that (1) only two political
parties dominate the government and (2) both enthusiastically commit to preserving and
supporting the capitalist system. For capitalism, the question of which party wins matters only
to how capitalism will be supported, not whether that support will be a top governmental
priority.
No matter who won, the private sector and the government will continue their shared failure
to overcome capitalism's socially destructive instability. Economic crashes ("downturns,"
"busts," "recessions," and "depressions") will continue to occur on average every four to seven
years, disrupting our economy and society. Already in this young century, we have endured,
across Republicans and Democrats, three crashes (2000, 2008, and 2020) in 20 years: true to the
historic average. Nothing capitalism tried in the past ever stopped or overcame its
instability. Nothing either party now proposes offers the slightest chance of doing that in the
future.
No matter who won, the historic undoing of the New Deal after 1945 will continue. The GOP
and Democrats will both keep reversing the 1930s' reduction of U.S. wealth and income
inequalities (forced from below by the Congress of Industrial Organizations [CIO], socialists,
and communists). As usual, the GOP reverses these gains for Americans further and faster than
Democrats, but both parties have condoned and managed the upward redistribution of wealth and
income since 1945.
The GOP will likely celebrate explicitly the wealthy they serve so slavishly. The Democrats
will likely moan occasionally about inequality while serving the wealthy quietly or implicitly.
The GOP will "economize on government costs" by cutting social programs for average people and
the poor. The Democrats will expand those programs while carefully avoiding any questioning,
let alone challenging, of capitalism.
No matter who won, what U.S. politics lacks is real choice. Both major parties function as
cheerleaders for capitalism under all circumstances, even when a killer pandemic coincides with
a major capitalist crash. Real political choice would require a party that criticizes
capitalism and offers a path toward social transition beyond capitalism. Countless polls prove
that millions of U.S. citizens want to consider socialist criticisms of capitalism and
socialist alternatives to it. The mass of voters for Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
and other socialists provided yet more evidence. However, the system allowed and enabled a
near-fascistic right wing to take over the GOP and the presidency. At the same time, it aided
and abetted the Democrats in excluding a socialist from even running for that presidency. Trump
and Biden are long-standing, well-known cheerleaders for capitalism. Sanders was, in contrast,
a critic.
A new political party that offered systemic criticisms of capitalism and advocated for a
transition to a worker-coop based economic system would bring real choice into U.S. politics.
It would place before the electorate a basic question of vital importance: what mix of
capitalist and worker-coop organized enterprises do you wish to work for, buy from, and live
with in the United States? Voters could thereby genuinely participate in deciding the range of
job descriptions from which each of us will become able to choose. Will we mostly have to
accept positions as employees whose jobs are designed exclusively by and for employers? Or will
all job descriptions include at least two basic tasks: a specific function within an
enterprise's division of labor plus an equal share (alongside all other enterprise workers) of
the powers to design and direct the enterprise as a whole?
Any community that wishes to call itself a "democracy" for more than rhetorical,
self-promotional reasons should welcome a one-person, one-vote decision-making process
governing how work is organized.
Most adults spend most of their lives at work. How that work is organized shapes how their
lives are lived and what skills, aptitudes, appetites, and relationships they develop. Their
work influences their other social roles as friends, lovers, spouses, and parents. In
capitalism, the work experience of the vast majority (employees) is shaped and controlled by a
small minority (employers) to secure the latter's profit, wealth accumulation, and reproduction
as the socially dominant minority. In a real democracy, the economy would have to be
democratically reorganized. Workplace decisions would be made on the basis of one person, one
vote inside each enterprise. Parallel, similarly democratic decision-making would govern
residential communities surrounding and interacting with workplaces. Workplace and residential
democracies would have significant influences over one another's decisions. In short, genuine
economic democracy would be the necessary partner to political democracy.
Many "capitalist" societies today include significant sites of enterprises organized as
worker cooperatives. What they need but lack are allied political parties to secure the
legislation, legal precedents, and administrative decisions to protect worker coops and
facilitate their growth. Early capitalist enterprises and enclaves within feudalism likewise
had to find or build political parties for the same reasons. Anti-feudal and pro-capitalist
parties contested with feudal lords and their monarchs first to protect capitalist enterprises'
existence and then to facilitate their growth. Eventually, pro-capitalist parties undertook
revolutions to displace feudalism and monarchies in favor of parliaments in which those
capitalist parties could and did dominate.
Today, pro-capitalist parties publicly deny but privately fear that their political
dominance is threatened. Mass disaffection from capitalism is growing. One reason is the
relocation of capitalism's growth from its old centers (Western Europe, North America, and
Japan) to new centers (China, India, and Brazil). Globalization -- the polite but confused term
for that relocation -- generates economic declines in the old centers that destabilize
communities unable to admit let alone prepare for them. There, vanishing job opportunities,
incomes, and social services provoke increasing questions and challenges confronting
capitalism. These are now leading to broad and growing disaffection from the capitalist system.
Polls and other signs of that disaffection abound. In the United States, on the one hand, the
Republican Party lurched to the right. Trump-type quasi-fascism wants to impose a nationalist
turn to "save" U.S. capitalism. On the other hand, the old, pro-capitalist establishment
running the Democratic Party blocked Bernie Sanders and other socialists from any real power or
voice. Saving capitalism was and also remains that establishment's goal.
Capitalism eventually defeated and displaced feudalism by combining micro-level construction
and expansion of capitalist enterprises with macro-focused political parties finding ways to
protect those enterprises and facilitate their growth. Capitalists' profits funded their
parties' activities.
This article was produced byEconomy for All, a
project of the Independent Media Institute.
And this is also another opportunity of all the other stuff the US could have demanded
their allies should do as well as the USA that they haven't done because it would have caused
extreme autof/kery, sic banning the sale of airliners, engines, electronics etc. Russia could
simply have pulled its titanium supply. Guess who's share prices would tank first and all the
consequences?
As we have pointed out here before, while the US is exhorting u-Rope to 'take on for the
team,' mega-corps (though weakening) like GE has arrange full localization of its turbine
(power/mineral extraction) business with a local Russian partner. Yes. GE, Microsoft and
others told the White House to f/k off. Not in public.
What we see is salami slicing sanctions (SSS) where the west adds small slices here and
there that do add up, the latest being on suppling microelectronics to the Russian aviation
industry. This is to hobble Russia's investment in its current rebuilding of its civil
airliner industry or what's left of it. These sanction are a dick move precisely because they
are easy and get support from both american political parties.
We have also covered on this blog many times before, cutting Russia off from the Joy of
Sex West, they've cut their own markets off (retail/food produce etc.) which Russia
has in turn finally massively self-invested for domestic products and also up market
equivalents. That's cost u-Rope billions not only in lost sales, but in future sales share
that will not return to where it once was.
So, cutting off western microelectronics for aircraft looks even more weak p*ss
considering Russia's state strategic program of Russianizing its aircraft programs despite
the obvious up front cost. Russia was doing this anyway because it was obvious which way the
wind was blowing. Either they get on with it or they will be forced to do it.
The west is running out of any meaningful sanctions they can enact without causing futher
blowback. How stupid is that? It's the product of thirty years of 'Do Something'
policy however dumb or short sighted because the West has to be seen to do something. The
concept of Leave it Alone has never crossed their minds. It really is an ad dick tion!
😉 Just don't expect to finding them in a self-help group admitting to all the nasty
s/t they've done and as part of their step program, reaching out and apologizing for any of
it. Neither them nor their media supporting hamsters.
In Lavrov's interview with Kommersant which was mostly about the conflict between
Armenia and Azerbaijan, he was asked about the US Election and then about the dire state of
relations with the EU. Lavrov reiterates Russia's position:
"I repeat once again that Russia will respect the choice of the American people, and that
we are ready to establish constructive cooperation with the winner of the race for the White
House, regardless of his party affiliation. However, considering the current circumstances,
we realistically assess the prospects of bilateral cooperation and do not expect too much.
Anyhow, let's wait for the voting results. We don't have long to wait."
Yes, the interview was done prior to the vote counting anarchy. IMO, we can substitute the
Outlaw US Empire for the EU in Lavrov's answer about the current crisis in relations:
"Russia's relations with the European Union are in crisis – and it is not our fault.
The EU bureaucracy and individual member states are using any, even the most absurd, reasons
to enhance something they call 'containment' of Russia.
"New sanctions, illegitimate from the international law perspective, are being imposed.
Considering the number of sanctions imposed on our citizens under far-fetched pretexts, the
EU is second only to the United States. The European media continue a broad anti-Russia
campaign. In trade and economy, the Brussels bureaucracy is stepping up various protectionist
policies, violating WTO rules and introducing its openly politicised rules of the game as
they go.
"At the same time, we are being told that Russia can "earn" the right to have normal
relations with the EU by changing its behaviour. This cynicism is absolutely off the
scale."
Lavrov repeats it's up to the EU to alter its behavior:
"[O]ur European colleagues must clearly understand that any interaction is only possible
on an honest and equal basis and respect for each other's interests. We will not allow any
one-sided games here. There will be no unilateral goodwill gestures on our part. We still
hope that a rational approach and common sense will prevail, both in Brussels and in member
capitals. We are ready to wait for that as well."
On the eve of the election, for example, Politico published a fawning
profile of Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who is laying the groundwork to become
speaker of the House in a future Republican majority. An ideological mirror of her father, she
and her cohort long for a restoration of the early 2000s Bushite foreign policy of
globe-trotting regime change and democratic nation building administered by a national security
state in Washington D.C.
Their cause, however, is as infertile as their past efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is
because despite his poor record, Donald Trump has created a permanent and growing disconnect
between the War Party and the GOP.
There is no need to sugarcoat how Donald Trump has squandered four years of opportunity in
foreign policy. His promises to bring the troops home have not materialized and remain
"promises" to be kept at a permanently delayed date. He has intensified U.S. interference in
Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Venezuela. He's overseen the continued deterioration of relations
with Russia, while leaving North Korea at the diplomatic altar. And he's brought the United
States and Iran into a first exchange of direct, open conflict.
A big-picture assessment, however, requires not looking at how Trump failed to bring what
restrainers wanted, but how he succeeded in destroying what they needed gone.
Trump's election caused the departure of the most loathsome of the war peddlers -- including
Bill Kristol, David Frum, Jamie Kirchick, Steve Schmidt, and Max Boot -- from Republican ranks.
United under the banner of "Never Trump," for four years they used every inch of column space,
every CNN interview, and a small fortune to cleave off a portion of the Republican base that
they believed would be happy to return to the world of 2006.
The result? Exit polls show Trump winning 93 percent of the Republican vote, a higher
percentage than he won in 2016. As an election post-mortem summarized,
Never Trump hawks "basically do not exist anywhere outside of the Washington Beltway or cable
news green rooms -- and after tonight's results, we shouldn't have to see them on TV or even
see their tweets ever again."
That the average American has the same respect for the War Party's minions as they have for
a tobacco executive should come as no surprise.
Polling continually shows a supermajority of Americans ready and eager to withdraw from
Iraq and Afghanistan. That includes 77 percent of Republicans, 40 percent of whom want to
decrease military engagement with the rest of the world as well. These voters are a vanguard
that will stop any future Bushite ascendance, whether from Nikki Haley or the spawn of Dick
Cheney.
Slowly, Republican members of Congress are beginning to reflect the wishes of their voters.
One year ago this month, I wrote about the
emerging cadre of antiwar conservatives in the House of Representatives. While most broke
under pressure to support Trump's escalation with Iran, not all did. It's a more active and
vocal Republican contingent than has existed for decades and it's growing fast. Following
Tuesday's results, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming will join Rand Paul and Mike Lee in the U.S.
Senate, while Nancy Mace of South Carolina will lock arms with Representatives Thomas Massie
and Matt Gaetz. Both women are vetted and proven war skeptics who are determined to challenge
Liz Cheney at every turn.
Beyond government, the creative destruction brought by the Trump presidency in conservative
circles has given a new lease on life to restrainers long excluded from the Beltway's
incestuous institutions. That includes the continued ascension of publications like The
American Conservative , which has become a wheelhouse for the
most important foreign policy conversations happening on the right; Tucker Carlson, whose
program has become the highest rated in cable news history, no doubt aided by his antiwar
opening monologues; the Quincy Institute, which is dragging other think tanks kicking and
screaming into dialogues about shifting U.S. positioning overseas; and activist organizations
like BringOurTroopsHome.US , a
collection of right-of-center veterans who are lobbying to end the country's unconstitutional
wars.
The American empire was formed over the course of a century, and currently encompasses over
850 overseas military bases. Hundreds of billions of dollars are exchanged every year through
facets of the military-industrial complex, while thousands of very powerful people make their
cushy salaries off the current imperialistic system (and will fight tooth and nail to keep it
that way).
One election was never going to change that. Donald Trump was never going to be a miracle
worker. But he's kicked in the door and let us in, even if we wish he'd tidied up better before
he left.
We have principled leaders in government. We have the infrastructure. And most importantly,
we have the voters. Liz Cheney and her misbegotten hangers-on may not realize it yet, but their
heyday has long past. It's our party now and we're going to bring America home.
Hunter DeRensis is the communications director of BringOurTroopsHome.US and a regular
contributor to The American Conservative . Follow him on Twitter
@HunterDeRensis.
Stephen Wertheim's Tomorrow, The World examines a shift in elite U.S.
foreign-policy thinking that took place in mid-1940. Why in that moment, a year and a half
before the Japanese attacks on the Philippines, Hawaii, and other outposts, did it become
popular in foreign-policy circles to advocate for US military domination of the globe?
In school text book mythology, the United States was full of revoltingly backward
creatures called isolationists at the time of World War I and right up through December 1941,
after which the rational adult internationalists took command (or we'd all be speaking German
and suffering through the rigged elections of fascistic yahoos, unlike this evening).
In fact, the term "isolationist" wasn't cooked up until the mid-1930s and then only as a
misleading insult to be applied to people who wished for the US government to engage with the
world in any number of ways from treaties to trade that didn't include militarism.
Anti-isolationism was and is a means of ridiculously pretending that "doing something" means
waging war, supporting NATO, and promoting the "responsibility to protect," while anything
else means "doing nothing."
There were distinctions in the 1920s between those who favored the League of Nations and
World Court and those who didn't. But neither group favored coating the planet with US
military bases, or extending even the most vicious conception of the Monroe Doctrine to the
other hemisphere, or replacing the League of Nations with an institution that would falsely
appear to establish global governance while actually facilitating US domination. Pre-1940
internationalists were, in fact, imperfect US nationalists. They, as Wertheim writes, "had
the capacity to see the United States as a potential aggressor requiring restraint." Some,
indeed, didn't need the word "potential" there.
What changed? There was the rise of fascism and communism. There was the notion that the
League of Nations had failed. There was the serious failure of disarmament efforts. There was
the belief that whatever came out of WWII would be dramatically different. In September 1939,
the Council on Foreign Relations began making plans to shape the postwar (yet permawar)
world. The Roosevelt White House into 1940 was planning for a postwar world that held a
balance of power with the Nazis. Ideas of disarmament, at least for others, were still very
much a part of the thinking. "Weapons dealer to the world" was not a title that it was ever
suggested that the United States strive for.
Wertheim sees a turning point in the German conquest of France. Change came swiftly in
May-June, 1940. Congress funded the creation of the world's biggest navy and instituted a
draft. Contrary to popular mythology, and propaganda pushed by President Roosevelt, nobody
feared a Nazi invasion of the Americas. Nor was the United States dragged kicking and
screaming into its moral responsibility to wage global permawar by the atrocious domestic
policies of the Nazis or any mission to rescue potential victims from Nazi genocide. Rather,
US foreign policy elites feared the impact on global trade and relations of a world
containing a Nazi power. Roosevelt began talking about a world in which the United States
dominated only one hemisphere as imprisonment.
The United States needed to dominate the globe in order to exist in the sort of global
order it wanted. And the only global order it wanted was one it dominated. Did US planners
become aware of this need as they watched events in Europe? Or did they become aware of its
possibility as they watched the US government build weapons and the US president acquire new
imperial bases? Probably some of each. Wertheim is right to call our attention to the fact
that US officials didn't talk about militarily dominating the whole globe prior to 1940, but
was there ever a time they talked about dominating anything less than what they had the
weapons and troops to handle? Certainly the voices had not all been monolithic, and there was
always an anti-imperialist tradition, but did it ever give much back to those it had
dispossessed until after WWII when airplanes and radios developed a new sort of empire (and
some colonies were made states but others more or less liberated)?
The US government and its advisers didn't just discover that they could rule the world and
that they needed to rule the world, but also that -- in the words of General George V.
Strong, chief of the Army's War Plans Division -- Germany had demonstrated the "tremendous
advantage of the offense over the defense." The proper defensive war was an aggressive war,
and an acceptable goal of that was what Henry Luce called living space and Hitler called
Lebensraum . US elites came to believe that only through war could they engage in
proper trade and relations. One can treat this as a rational observation based on the growth
of fascism, although some of the same people making the observation had fascistic tendencies,
the problem with Germany seems to have existed for them only once it had invaded other
nations that were not Russia, and there is little doubt that had the United States lived
sustainably, locally, egalitarianly, contentedly, and with respect for all humanity, it could
not have observed a need for permawar in the world around it -- much less gone on observing
it for 75 years.
In early 1941, a US political scientist named Harold Vinacke asked, "When the United
States has its thousands of airplanes, its mass army, properly mechanized, and its two-ocean
navy, what are they to be used for?" Officials have been asking the same right up through
Madeline Albright and Donald Trump, with the answer generally being found to be as
self-evident as other patriotic "truths." By summertime 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill had
announced the future organization of the world in the Atlantic Charter.
If hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue, there remained some virtue in US
society and its conception of foreign policy at the time of WWII, because a major focus of
postwar planners was how to sell global domination to the US public (and incidentally the
world, and perhaps most importantly themselves) as being something other than what it was.
The answer, of course, was the United Nations (along with the World Bank, etc.).
Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles described the design of the United Nations thus: "what
we required was a sop for the smaller states: some organization in which they could be
represented and made to feel themselves participants." In Roosevelt's words before the
creation of the U.N., all nations but four, in a future global organization, would merely
"blow off steam."
Roosevelt also proposed that the existence of such a phony organization would allow it to
declare war instead of the US Congress, meaning that a US president would be able to launch
wars at will -- something like what we've seen for the past 75 years with NATO occasionally
having filled in for a malfunctioning United Nations.
Roosevelt believed that the United States signed up for global policeman when it defeated
Hitler. Neither Roosevelt nor Wertheim mentions that the Soviet Union did 80% of defeating
Hitler, after having done about 0% of creating him.
But surely the job of world cop can be resigned, no matter how one got into it. The
question now is how. The financial and bureaucratic and media and campaign-corruption
interests all work against dismantling the permawar military, just as does the ideology of
anti-"isolationism." But it certainly cannot hurt to be aware of the dishonesty in the
ideology and of the fact that it was not always with us.
A vote for Trump is a vote against America's ruling class
On Saturday night, President Trump held a campaign
rally in Butler, Pa. Butler is a town 35 miles north of Pittsburgh, and it's like a lot of
places you'll find in this country once you head inland from the coasts.
Butler is a former industrial town -- they made Pullman rail cars there for many years --
but it's been losing population for decades. There are still a lot of nice people in Butler and
for $60,000 or so, you can buy a decent house there. It's a place you might be happy in.
But our professional class is not impressed by Butler. They don't consider Butler, Pa. or
places like it to be the future. To them, places like Butler are embarrassing relics of a past
best forgotten. The men of Butler may have built this country, and they did, but they mean
nothing to our leaders now. You can be certain of that because when large numbers of people in
Butler started killing themselves with narcotics, no one in Washington or New York or Los
Angeles said a word about it.
Trump supporters hold up four fingers as they chant 'Four More Years' at President Trump's
campaign rally in Butler, Pa. Saturday. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
There have now been so many opioid deaths in Butler that a few years ago, residents built an
overdose memorial in the middle of town. MSNBC didn't cover that.
So given all of that, it was interesting how the people around Butler feel about Donald
Trump. Between 10,000 and 15,000 people came out to see him Saturday night, depending on whose
estimate you believe. Pictures of the rally site showed a sea of people obscuring the horizon,
the kind of image you would see of a visit from the pope.
When was the last time a political speech drew that many people? Well, the media didn't ask.
Instead, they attacked the rally as a "superspreader" event. OK, we'll leave the epidemiology
to CNN.
But the questions still hung in the air. Why did all those people come? They must have known
that Donald Trump is the most evil man who hass ever lived. They've heard that every day for
five years. They know that people who support Donald Trump are also evil, they're bigots,
they're morons, they're racist cult members. They know that Americans have been fired from
their jobs for supporting Donald Trump, not to mention kicked off social media, belittled by
their kids' teachers and shunned by decent society. Only losers and freaks support Donald
Trump.
People in Butler knew all of that. But on Saturday, they went to the Donald Trump rally,
anyway. Why exactly did they do that? We should be pondering that question deeply as we watch
Tuesday night's returns and as we live through the aftermath of them.
Millions of Americans sincerely love Donald Trump. They love him in spite of everything
they've heard. They love him, often, in spite of himself. They're not deluded. They know
exactly who Trump is. They love him anyway.
Trump addresses the crowd at his rally in Butler, Pa. (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic)
They love Donald Trump because no one else loves them. The country they built, the country
their ancestors fought for over hundreds of years, has left them to die in unfashionable little
towns, mocked and despised by the sneering halfwits with finance degrees -- but no actual
skills -- who seem to run everything all of a sudden.
Whatever Donald Trump's faults, he is better than the rest of the people in charge. At least
he doesn't hate them for their weakness. Donald Trump, in other words, is and has always been a
living indictment of the people who run this country. That was true four years ago when he came
out of nowhere to win the presidency. And it's every bit as true right now, maybe even more
true than it's ever been. It will remain true regardless of whether Donald Trump wins
reelection.
Trump rose because they failed. It's as simple as that. If the people in charge had done a
halfway decent job with the country they inherited, if they cared about anything other than
themselves, even for just a moment, Donald Trump would still be hosting "Celebrity Apprentice."
But they didn't. Instead, they were incompetent and narcissistic and cruel and relentlessly
dishonest. They wrecked what they didn't build, and they lied about it. They hurt anyone who
told the truth about what they were doing. That's all true. We all watched.
America is still a great country, the best in the world, but our ruling class is disgusting.
A vote for Trump is a vote against them. That's what's going on in those pictures from Butler.
That's what's going on in this country.
"... One camp within the elites recognizes the danger and seeks reforms , but the reforms are too little, too late, and in any event, the elites who cling most ardently to the past stability fight the reform movement to a standstill. ..."
"... So take your pick, America: what's the closest analogy? A sclerotic Politburo of elders living in the past, an elite fiddling while the nation disintegrates, or an elite so out of touch with reality that it claims inflation is zero while the populace can no longer afford bread? ..."
Rome, the USSR and Revolutionary France are all compelling analogies due to the hubristic
cluelessness of their fractured elites as the pretensions of stability collapsed around them.
Even though Nero didn't actually fiddle while Rome burned and Marie Antoinette didn't gush "Let
them eat brioche" when notified that the peasants had no bread (or more accurately, could no
longer afford it), these myths are handy encapsulations of the disconnect from reality that
infested the elites in the last years before the deluge of non-linear chaos overwhelmed the
regimes.
While historians gather evidence of tipping points such as pandemics, ecological damage,
invasions, droughts, inflation, etc., the core dynamic is ultimately the loss of social
cohesion within the ruling elites and in the social order at large.
As a generality, the permanence of the status quo is taken for granted by elites, who then
feel free to squabble amongst themselves over the spoils of wealth and power. Distracted by
their own infighting, the elites are blind to the erosion of the foundations of their
power.
As coherence in the elites unravels, the ties uniting the elites with the masses unravel as
well.
One camp within the elites recognizes the danger and seeks reforms , but the reforms are too
little, too late, and in any event, the elites who cling most ardently to the past stability
fight the reform movement to a standstill.
As social cohesion unravels, systems that once seemed immutable (i.e. linear ) suddenly
display non-linear dynamics in which modest changes that would have made little difference in
the past now unleash regime-shattering disorder.
So take your pick, America: what's the closest analogy? A sclerotic Politburo of elders
living in the past, an elite fiddling while the nation disintegrates, or an elite so out of
touch with reality that it claims inflation is zero while the populace can no longer afford
bread?
They all lead to the same destination.
richsob , 1 hour ago
I know a lot of history and I think we will go the route of Rome. We will have a slow
slide into total failure from a debased currency, an over extended military, tax revolts,
unmanageable immigration and an internal war among the elites.
HRH of Aquitaine 2.0 , 1 hour ago
My name is an indirect reference to France and the French Revolution.
When Pelosi was photo'd in front of two massive Sub Zero fridges with gourmet ice cream,
that was the equivalent of "let them eat brioche." She is fvucking clueless. A tool that is
barely coherent, much like Joe.
People see through it. The greed of the politicians, and their apparatchiks, the
bureaucrats, is obvious to anyone willing to look. FFS apparatchiks can retire with six
fixure salaries after being a government employee! People are sick to death of their
arrogance, their greed, their out-and-out abuse of the taxpayer!
The other analogy, which I think is valid, is to ancient Rome. I was a philosophy major /
Latin minor so took quite few courses involving the classes, reading the classics, or
translating them. I also spent a semester in Rome, tramping through the Forum and walking
underground and overground. In 1997 Rome was a beautiful city, mostly safe.
Anyhow, ancient Rome ended up debasing their currency, literally. Which the US (and other
central banks) are doing with excessive money printing.
Excessive taxation drove away the tax base of ancient Rome. The first jingle keys event
was there. Why? Taxes were too high. People will work hard if there is a profit incentive and
they are able to earn a good return from their labor. Once that incentive was gone, people
abandoned their farms and property and left. Where did they go? Away. Away from the tax
collectors, which were richly rewarded for any taxes they were able to collect. I suppose at
the end, the collection methods became quite brutal. At that point, when it is your money or
your life, you throw the tax collector your money and flee with your life. You walk away from
land that you love and start over.
Never an easy choice to abandon one's land and home. But that is exactly what
happened.
Central bankers and governments, along with the common citizen, would do well to heed
historical precedents.
MAOUS , 31 minutes ago
I see it more like The Godfather Part I & II. We were betrayed by the stupidest
simpletons of our own family (citizenry) that sold us out for trinkets, false promises of
grandeur and propaganda from Rival Mafia Families who wanted to rub our family out, kill our
leader and take over. "I didn't know until today, it was Barzini all along." Yeah, but Fredo
was the turn coat that made it all possible. Meet the simpletons of our Family known as your
fellow American voter. "A Republic, if you can keep it." We lost it, kiss it goodbye. Say
hello to the new Black Hand on the block.
Omega Point , 1 hour ago
One of the best articles on ZH in a while. The elites are so full of hubris, they behave
as if the state of affairs since the post-WWII era has always been the state of affairs
throughout history and are immutable. They believe that they are cause of America's
dominance, not the individuals who built this country on whose goodwill they are now quickly
draining.
I think we're like Rome. Currency debasement, no border security, massively corrupt
politicians, most of population on welfare, and games and circuses to distract from the
rot.
The elites will soon be surprised how quickly things will decline, just as shocked as the
Romans when the Visigoths came through the city walls and looted the Imperial City in 410
AD.
play_arrow
sbin , 1 hour ago
The USSR was very similar with decrepit old party hacks ruining everything.
Unfortunately American exceptional lunatics will try to destroy the world before excepting
reality.
Never been a group so corrupt and delusional with so much destructive weaponry.
Dr Strangelove is more appropriate.
RKKA , 1 hour ago
In the summer of 1941, the 4th Panzer Division of Heinz Guderian, one of the most talented
German tank generals, broke through to the Belarusian town of Krichev. Parts of the 13th
Soviet Army were retreating. Only one gunner, Nikolai Sirotinin, did not retreat - very
young, short, thin.
On that day, it was necessary to cover the withdrawal of troops. “There will be two
people with a cannon here,” said the battery commander. Nikolai volunteered. The second
was the commander himself.
On the morning of July 17, a column of German tanks appeared on the highway.
Nikolai took up a position on the hill right on the field. The cannon was sinking in the
high rye, but he could clearly see the highway and the bridge over the river. When the lead
tank reached the bridge, Nikolai knocked it out with the first shot. The second shell set
fire to the armored personnel carrier that closed the column.
We must stop here. Because it is still not entirely clear why Nikolai was left alone at
the cannon. But there are versions. He apparently had just the task - to create a "traffic
jam" on the bridge, knocking out the head car of the Nazis. The lieutenant at the bridge and
adjusted the fire, and then, disappeared. It is reliably known that the lieutenant was
wounded and then he left towards the withdrawing positions. There is an assumption that
Nikolai had to move away, having completed the task. But ... he had 60 rounds. And he
stayed!
Two tanks tried to move the lead tank off the bridge, but they were also hit. The armored
vehicle tried to cross the river not across the bridge. But she got stuck in a swampy shore,
where another shell found her. Nikolai shot and shot, knocking out tank after tank ...
Guderian's tanks rested on Nikolai Sirotinin, like the Chinese wall, like the Brest
fortress. Already 11 tanks and 6 armored personnel carriers were on fire! For almost two
hours of this strange battle, the Germans could not understand where the gun was firing from.
And when we reached the position of Nikolai, he had only three shells left. The Germans
offered him to surrender. Nikolai responded by firing at them with a carbine.
This last battle was short-lived ...
11 tanks and 7 armored vehicles, 57 soldiers and officers were lost by the Nazis after the
battle, where they were blocked by the Russian soldier Nikolai Sirotinin.
The inscription on the monument: "Here at dawn on July 17, 1941 entered into combat with a
column of fascist tanks and in a two-hour battle repulsed all enemy attacks, senior artillery
sergeant Nikolai Vladimirovich Sirotinin, who gave his life for the freedom and independence
of our Motherland."
"After all, he is a Russian soldier, is such admiration necessary?" These words were
written down in his diary by Chief Lieutenant of the 4th Panzer Division Henfeld: “July
17, 1941. Sokolnichi, near Krichev. An unknown Russian soldier was buried in the evening. He
alone stood at the cannon, shot a convoy of our tanks and infantry for a long time, and died.
Everyone was amazed at his courage ... Oberst (Colonel) before the grave said that if all the
soldiers of the Fuehrer fought like this Russian soldier, they would have conquered the whole
world! Three times they fired volleys from rifles. After all, he is a Russian soldier, is
such admiration necessary? "
Ordinary people were ready to defend and die for the USSR. And who is Gorbachev, who
destroyed the USSR. A traitor who betrayed everything and everyone. A stupid dilettante who
imagines himself a world-class politician. The main drawback of the USSR was that the power
was too concentrated in the hands of one person, who was trusted without question. But when
people realized where he was leading the country, it was too late.
Max21c , 2 hours ago
It's a mix between Nazi Germany and its criminality and thievery and persecution
machinery, and Bolshevist Russia and its criminality and thievery and persecution machinery
and many third world banana republics and their criminality and thievery and political
persecution machinery.
Face it Washingtonians are evil.
ZeroTruth , 1 hour ago
Americuck in and of its entirety is just a criminal organization. I know a restaraunteur
that started his business in the Bay Area selling drugs using a fleet of vehicles that had
hidden compartments everywhere. Each vehicle was capable of holding up to half a key of yay
and powdered molly already grammed up. Drivers were issued burner phones and given orders via
dispatcher.
Last I checked, he had 7 restaurants that did amazing business and those vehicles were
still on the road providing the other service. That's just one of the many I know of and it's
small time compared to what the US government is doing.
ZeroTruth , 1 hour ago
Americuck in and of its entirety is just a criminal organization. I know a restaraunteur
that started his business in the Bay Area selling drugs using a fleet of vehicles that had
hidden compartments everywhere. Each vehicle was capable of holding up to half a key of yay
and powdered molly already grammed up. Drivers were issued burner phones and given orders via
dispatcher.
Last I checked, he had 7 restaurants that did amazing business and those vehicles were
still on the road providing the other service. That's just one of the many I know of and it's
small time compared to what the US government is doing.
DeeDeeTwo , 2 hours ago
The elites, Big Tech, Media and Deep State threw the kitchen sink at this election and did
not move the needle. Regardless of who is next President, nothing changes. This is a tribute
to the stability of the American system. In fact, the pendulum is swinging against the
subversives who are becoming increasingly reckless and discredited.
TBT or not TBT , 2 hours ago
What did Huxley call the future country depicted in Brave New World?
Western hypocrisy revealed 10 years after the event in today's Independent:
"Tony Blair and Iraq: The damning evidence" . And they go on and on about those wicked,
evil Russians and their tyrannical leader causing death and destruction Syria by their
"support" of the Assad government whilst the West arms the "freedom fighters" there.
300 election don't count comments not one comment about the future of America? All I see
here is who shall be king of the mountain. What is it that our leader (whoever it is, should
do)?
1. Reduce military spending by 50% per year for each of the next four years.
2. Close 50% of the military bases each year, over each of the next four years
3. Standardize national examinations for high school and undergraduate degrees pass the
examination
receive the BS or BA.. degree.. eliminate any all accreditation requirements, people can
study wherever
whenever and how ever they wish. Tutorials not bureaucratic institutions will prepare the
students for
the examinations.
4. eliminate copyright and patent laws so as to reduce the wealth gap and so as to return
America to
from monopolism to capitalism.
5. fix the constitution so the governed have a powerful, meaningful say in not just in how
uses the
government to govern, but also so the governed have a powerful say in what it is those who
are elected
to the government must accomplish why they are in the employee of our elected government.
6. Find a way to get the USA activities subject to human rights courts.
7. Paint all of the white people black in order to eliminate race as condition of
life.
A list of goals and objectives should be put forth on what the elected are supposed to
accomplish in the next four years. In that way, it will not matter who is the President, what
will matter is did he or she accomplish what it was they were elected to do?
There is nothing in China like the military-industrial complex of the United States that
structurally fosters militarism and imperialism with its powerful "lobbies" and think
tanks. The mandarins of the United States are prisoners of a network that greatly
complicates their adaptation to the new world. Its powerful and efficient propaganda
apparatus ("information & entertainment") presents the United States' two-headed,
single-party political regime based on the money aristocracy as a democracy.
That is really well put.
"The mandarins of the United States are prisoners of a network that greatly complicates
their adaptation to the new world"
Nevada will put Joe Biden over for the Presidential win..
Tonight.. Now the question is. How long will Biden last until Harris becomes the Queen of
Spades of Pentagon?
See? Twitter is cool with allowing this posting by David Litt, former Obama speechwriter,
*today* 5:34 pm Nov 4 of a democrat ballot "curing" (post Nov 3 ballot harvesting) assistance
operation in Georgia over the next three days (Wed, Thurs and Fri)
Attention everyone in or near Georgia: We need YOUR help today! This race is not over
and we need every single vote to be counted.
It is all hands on deck and all eyes on Georgia!
Join us today for a virtual training to learn how to knock doors to help voters cure
their ballots. We need you in this fight with us today and tomorrow and Friday. We've come
so far, this is how we bring it home. See you in the virtual training room and out knocking
doors soon!"
"The guy at the source of the whole kerfluffle acknowledges that the 130,000 magical votes
Tweet was based on incorrect data"
-Posted by: _K_C_ | Nov 5 2020 3:50 utc | 306
I'm not so sure about this, _K_C. His explanation for the late night MI Biden vote bump
"kerfluffle" still smells sketchy to me. Given the stakes, could someone have gotten that guy
to "flip" his statement after the fact?
Many nationalists plan to vote for Trump, not due to a positive assessment of his first
term, but for the same reason people line up for terrible movie sequels: warm and fuzzy
nostalgia, sometimes inexplicable. Once upon a time the prospect of electing this man made the
people we all hate but who rule us anyway visibly afraid.
Spite for the "coastal elites" in tortoiseshell glasses will likely save the day.
But don't expect the same flood of libtard tears this time around outside of maybe low level
MSNBC watchers. The real elite, the Jews, now realize that Trump's gun had an orange tip spray
painted black the whole time.
Trump began betraying his voters almost as soon as he was sworn into office. The only
figures in Trump's populist campaign who survived the 2016 election were Steve Bannon, who was
banished after Charlottesville and is now facing federal charges at the hands of Trump's own
Department of Justice, and Jeff Sessions, whose political career was destroyed by Trump's
calculated malice.
A victory in 2016 by any of the generic GOP hacks who lost during the primary would've been
indistinguishable from the last four years of Trump, policy-wise.
Draining the swamp and transforming the Republicans into a worker's party? No. Instead, his
cabinet positions
were staffed by the swamp scum at the Heritage Foundation.
Deportation force and a wall? He trots out Stephen Miller
before any big vote , but nothing was accomplished on this front. Barack Obama removed
50% more
illegal aliens in his first term than Trump has. In his first two years of holding the
Presidency and Congress, Trump made no effort to present legislation to combat illegal
immigration or even increase border security. There are more Asian and Central American illegal
aliens in the United States right now than before he took office.
Punishing "LIBERAL DONORS"? Heritage's appointments have helped enable a corporate crime
wave not seen in recent memory, with laughable cases of naked insider trading like the
"paused" loan to Kodak personally protected by Trump's inner circle. Every multi-national
and NGO has been scamming the PPP system, Trump's promise to crack down on this
will never materialized . White collar crime prosecutions have fallen to a
33-year low during this administration.
Is it any wonder these "donors" have so much money laying around they can use it to fund
Black Lives Matter?
This round of American populism has been defeated by the Swamp conservatives, many who were
originally Trump foes and but now gleefully wear MAGA hats and have shoved aside relatively
independent alt-light con artists and
the organic ethno-nationalist movement. The conservatives we thought we canceled, like the Jews
Ben Shapiro, Mark Levine, and Dennis Prager have come back from the dead thanks to Big Tech's
massive crackdown on independent media.
The problem for Trump is that conservatism is widely hated, especially by his voters.
Trump's tax cut for billionaires is one of his administration's only policy achievements, and
it is the
most unpopular thing he has ever done.
What will carry Trump over the finish line is the understandable desire to trigger the
libs just one last time, in a way that won't get you fired from your job or
antagonized by the FBI . The immense power the Judeo-left has amassed by uniting suburban
liberals, big capitalists, permanent bureaucrats and antifa under Trump has contributed to
white working people becoming atomized, thus demoralized, thus susceptible to Trump's campaign
year presentation as The Last White Man .
Seeing the conservative movement peering out from under the mountains of shit we shoveled on
them to dominate the Trump-era is testament to the flexibility and tenacity -- thanks to Jewish
"philanthropy" -- of the phony right. The time-sink, money-sink non-issues of abortion, the
supposed justification for confirming Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, has re-emerged as
a supposedly important issue. Last year the abortion rate fell to the lowest
levels ever, largely due to low rates of sex between young people and the widespread
adoption of contraceptives.
But the Koch brothers know what we're really getting in ACB. The notorious "Americans for
Prosperity"
spent millions to push her through because she will be the most pro-big business justice on
the court (she sided with big business 85% of the time during her
judgeship), which explains the complete lack of a fight from the Democrats. 15 of the last 19
SCOTUS judges have been appointed by the Republican Party, yet the court has become more
pro-business and socially "liberal" anyway.
As Ted Cruz has recently stated, once the election is over and they're no longer under
pressure from voters, Trump and the GOP will be returning to
business as usual : imposing austerity during an unprecedented unemployment crisis,
ratcheting up military tensions with enemies of Israel, and as the
Heritage Foundation predicts in its conclusion of Trump v. Biden on immigration, a massive
amnesty bill that will introduce a new "merit-based immigration system" -- the H1-B program on
steroids.
While nobody thinks Trump's "platinum plan for black America" will ever come to be, the mere
suggestion will be opening up a debate we should not be having. Explicit
no-whites-need-apply social policies are another cultural artifact of the Trump era bound to
become acceptable in his second term.
For establishment Democrats, their second defeat at the hands of Trump will be enormously
discrediting, but they will profit in the short term from their comfortable position as the
opposition party. By running a candidate like Joe Biden, one can only assume they want to
lose.
But the Clinton-Biden-Obama-Pelosi nexus, who planned to fill "Sleepy Joe's" spayed cabinet
with people like John Kasich, Jeff
Flake , and various in-house neo-liberals, will be pressured by actual communists in their
party to step aside. The Republican Party will never be able to meet this challenge, instead
Trump and Charlie Kirk will be riding a helicopter to Botswana to cut the ribbon on a new
bathhouse and dance to the Village People when the next incident occurs and the nation is once
again on fire.
The New York Times has turned this election into a referendum on Woke + Wall
Street. The majority, even many non-whites, will be rejecting America's new official ideology
today.
From the beginning, one side of me has always thought Trump to be too good to be true. My
first doubts about him came when I learned his daughter was married to a powerful Jew and
she's adopted his religion. Trump has turned out to be the most pro-Zionist president ever
and has even moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem...
Best thing I have read on Trump. Here is my one reservation
"The real elite, the Jews, now realize that Trump's gun had an orange tip spray painted
black the whole time."
Forget "now realize". At least Trump's Jews – the ones anti Jewish Power Trump
supporters never report on – have ALWAYS realized that Trump is shabbos goy to the
bone. I am talking about Jews like:
Lew Eisenberg, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Mel Sembler, Ron Weiser, Steve Wynn, Elliott
Brody, Laurie Perlmutter, and Carl Icahn, not to mention Bernie Marcus. Then we have his many
Jewish personal and professional associates, who include, among others, Avi Berkowitz,
Michael Cohen, Gary Cohn, Reed Cordish, Boris Epshteyn, David Friedman, Jason Greenblatt,
Larry Kudlow, Stephen Miller, Steven Mnuchin, Jay Sekulow, David Shulkin, and Allen
Weisselberg. All those Trump-defenders out there in America should be dismayed at his vast
linkage to the people of Israel(See Thomas Dalton, True Q)
These are the big Business Republican Jews and their apparatchiks as opposed to the new
class professionals, academics, intellectuals, mediaist, journalists, and policy wonks who
comprise the neo liberal – liberal and neocon Jews of the Democrat Party. Unlike the
Democrat Jews who don't know Trump existentially – he's too vulgar and undereducated
– and really do think, or perhaps at least thought, that Trump could be the coming of a
new Hitler, the Business Jews have had long actual existential relations with Trump or know
Jews who have. Trump has been up to his ears in Jews of the Big Business type his whole life
and they know he is firmly in the Semophile bag. As Jews , Trump's Jews want Zionism and have
always known he is good for it. But they also want every break they can get for Big Business
because what could be better for Jews who prosper from neoliberalism right across their
higher class status? As Striker argues , Trump will give Jews another round of business
breaks like those he had already given in his first term. And there will go his populist
image but it will have served its purpose
All this could have been easily predicted if someone in our ethnic realism community had
taken a good look at Trump's Jews. Instead Trump was allowed to pose as "the last white
man"
Actually E Michael Jones sort of tried it but he didn't get any support. Why is that?
Well, I don't know who won yet and I doubt that anyone will ever know since everything is
rigged, but Old Joe has most of the alphabet agencies in his pocket, the MSM in his corner
and a whole lot of Obama, Clinton trotskyites lookin after him. That should mean that he
should win by a landslide, unless he lets the popular vote for Trump – into the
election process – which would be shrewd .. lol As far as America goes – SNAFU d
again.
I've been sitting here watching the election maps all night.
The counting stopped around 8:30 – 9:00 Pacific time. It hasn't moved since.
If you go into the counties on the particular states that have stalled, you can do the
math.
Clearly Trump was winning and if counts allowed, they should be able to call it.
Amazingly, they called Arizona when it was only something like 68% complete.
NV was going red but it shows it is swaying blue now it is the only state that has updated
in last 3 hours besides Arizona.
It looks like they might be trying to pull something (the Democrats/Deep state).
I've never seen this happen. There is no reason for it to have happened.
WI, MI, PA, NC and GA are all pending red, along with the 1 electoral vote in ME.
Go to bed. In morning we'll get up and Biden will be declared winner with most of the
above states declared blue (sometime during the night when most people are sleeping).
Superficial article. The author did write a few good sentences, but seems to have missed
that Trump is at most a potential catalyst for white awakening. If that does not happen, you
can't blame him. You can only blame yourself for a combination of spinelessness, stupidity,
cowardice & naivety.
If the central pillar of America, whites, are so immature or so divided, US cannot last.
No empire which was not a nation-state too, did survive in history. It disintegrated &
collapsed.
Too bad Trump is jewish and fully cooperated with his shitty ethnic group and their
endless treasonous schemes many times. The alt-right/Q/MAGA jewish psyop (the real
Russiagate), HARPA, Barr covering up many crimes of the tribe (Epstein, Trump's crimes, big
tech, fake BLM/ANTIFA protests, ), treasonous cooperation with Israel, the coronavirus flu
scam, close ties to illegal mass surveillance contractors and Chabad Lubavich, shady deals
with banks, handing money over to his fellows in "coronavirus aid packages", engaging in
trade wars that seemed to be stupid, but had the objective of imploding the US economy to
pave way for China (same for the flu scam and 2008 crisis)
Biden isn't that different either.
@Anon out civilization
and barbarism that Hudson quite matter-of-factly agreed with me that the book is, to the
extent that it will be understood, " earth-shattering" in both intent and effect .
The movement that Striker is referring to, has have a moral component, otherwise the agents
of Mammon win again. Our (((friends))) have been winning for centuries, because they have
redefined reality using their ill-gotten gains. Clown world is funded.
But whether we get Trump or Biden, we need to organize our own political movement or we
will be getting it anyway.
The point is that there's not a dimes worth of difference between the Democrats and
Republicans and their candidates and therefore voting is a waste of time.
It looks like they might be trying to pull something (the Democrats/Deep state).
Yes, they're trying to cheat, no doubt. Of course, nobody will care enough to do anything
about it. Had Trump actually done something for White people, the erstwhile alt-right might
have organized Charlottesville-style rallies in support of Trump, but he didn't, so they won't.
That's what he gets for being a cuck and throwing his most committed supporters under the
bus.
Trump is like the abusive alcoholic husband and American conservatives(mostly Whites)are
like the battered wife. Deep down we know the beatings will never stop, but we continue to give
our love and support to him. We know we should leave him, perhaps find a new man to share our
love with and help raise our kids. The problem is we are stuck in a neighborhood of crack heads
and heroine addicts, and the new husband would turn out worse than the last...
The old saw that Obama deported more illegals than did Trump in the first term is a lie
exposed many times over. At the border under Bush II, Mexicans caught coming across were simply
sent back on their own recognizance (ORed) and not counted as a deportation. There were
thousands and thousands treated this way by the Border Patrol and Immigration. To get the
deportation numbers up, Obama ordered that ORs be counted as deportations, so therein is the
lie.
I must agree with this article. Trump has largely betrayed his base, and is no more likely
to do better for the average working class American in his second term than he has in his
first. It's painful, I don't want to admit this either, but as they say, optimism is
cowardice.
I must however object to the notion that the Democrats are in any way "communist." Do
communists throw tens of trillions of dollars at Wall Street while starving the real economy of
investment? Do communists support "surprise medical billing?" Do communists allow all important
financial decisions to be made by private corporations? Oh sure, the Democrats will come up
with all sorts of confiscatory taxes and regulations on the middle class, no doubt, and they
will subsidize illegal immigrants – which is to say, they will subsidize cheap labor for
the elites. And yes they will be for transgender bathrooms. But communists? No way no how, the
Democrats are Neoliberal scum just like the Republicans.
Make a new political movement? It would be nice, but I can't see any way that such a thing
will not be suppressed or co-opted or the leadership bought out etc.etc. Look what happened to
"Golden Dawn" in Greece
Sadly I think the last white man is going to lose. The election has been stolen from him
with mass voting fraud, both in vote counting and mass voting by illegal voters. He has also
shot himself in the foot over the last four years with several major blunders, which did not
help, for e.g.:
1) Calling off the voting fraud investigation and disbanded the investigative team soon
after his inauguration in 2016.
2) Too thin skin and incendiary in his tweets, not very Presidential and made unnecessary
enemies.
3) Didn't do enough to reduce legal immigration incl. H1B and OPTs right from the get go,
which lost him a lot of enthusiasm from college educated voters. He only finally began to do
something about it last month, too little too late. Stephen Miller turned out to be a fake
patriot after all, who kept out true patriots like Kris Kobach from running the DHS.
4) Kept/promoted his enemies like Paul Ryan, John Kelly, Rod Rosenstein, James Comey, HR
McMaster, Gina Haspel, Christopher Wray et. al, which came back to haunt him very quickly.
5) Letting wormtongue (Jared Kushner) into the WH and giving him far too much power,
including freeing all the drug dealers.
6) At times it seemed like the only thing he cares about is the stock market, he made lots
of people way richer than they were in 2016, and these are all the people who are now voting
against him, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley.
7) Too many Jews and Ziocons in his cabinet. Pandered too much to Israel, making his real
slogan more like MIGA than MAGA.
Come to think of it, Trump is not the last white man. He is the last Ziocon Jew to become
president.
Trump did not win by a landslide as so many hoped. There is a reason for the red wave fail,
and it is Trump himself and his policies.
Trump's biggest enemy is himself, he spent the entire administration making threats and
filling his administration with swamp criminals, he is slavishly whored to Netanyahu and
Israel, he even murdered Soleimani. He didn't remove the troops from a single occupied nation.
Trump's failure as a good administrator is glaring obvious and of no surprise because he had no
previous governmental experience. He just winged it based on being the Donald. What a joke. A
nation ruled by one ego that thinks it is god.
He never went on the offensive with 911 truth, which would put the entire swamp under
investigation and in a fight to stay out of prison. With 911 investigation Israel would be put
on a leash, and the Neocons would ALL be indicted, along with the Jewish newspapers and
lobbies. Because Trump REFUSED to investigate the biggest crime in history because of his god
damned loyalty to Jews and Israel, it is Trump who spent his entire presidency in a defensive
mode.
When asked if he condemns white supremacy Trump did not condemn the interviewer or defend
white people. Pathetic. He's cucked to the Jewish media narrative. And why doesn't he take
legal or military action against the Jewish media? Because he is bed with Kushners and the
Adelsons.
As a result of his own actions Trump who could of won by a landslide is now in a stalemate
with creeper senile Biden, one of the most pathetic candidates ever. Trump failures all center
around his loyalties to Jews and Israel.
So this election is looking more and more like a stalemate and I would like to bring to
everyone's attention that there is a "prophecy" of how this ends:
"The presidents of the U.S., a supposedly free country, have been abusing their power to
an increasingly greater extent. During a time of social unrest even more so than the period
of Viet Nam and Watergate, the electoral college will be evenly split over the election of
the new president. The process will stalemate, with many people clamoring for whichever
candidate they voted for, causing enormous tension in the country. Internationally it will be
a sensitive situation.
Because of the split, and the extremely volatile and explosive social unrest, putting
either candidate in office instead of the other could start a civil war or a revolution.
After a long time of impassioned speeches invoking patriotism and the founding fathers, a
compromise solution of holding another election will be taken, and a candidate will be
installed without disaster."
PS I have no dog in the fight and I don't vote, I will never vote for a lesser of two evils,
if the two pedo candidates is the best the nation can do when we have 337 million people to
pick from then maybe the nation needs to fall.
persistence and evolution of the US two/uni party system is interesting.
It is due to the "winner take all" election rules rather than a proportional system. For the
most part, US voters vote straight party anyway, so I don't see why we can't just go to a
proportional system where you vote for a party, and based upon that party's percentage of vote,
they get to fill X seats. Perhaps that would not work with the Presidential or Senate
elections, but would at least work for the House.
It looks like Republicans will be keeping the Senate. They almost did win House also.
So Biden cannot do too much, except to make some wars, regulate the international trade and
give some money to freeloaders residing in the cities.
In the mean time the rate of debt will significantly increase.
I do not think there could be any negotiations with Russians because Biden is unreliable.
Trump began betraying his voters almost as soon as he was sworn into office. The only
figures in Trump's populist campaign who survived the 2016 election were Steve Bannon, who
was banished after Charlottesville and is now facing federal charges at the hands of Trump's
own Department of Justice, and Jeff Sessions, whose political career was destroyed by Trump's
calculated malice.
Remember Kris Kobach and how he was going to investigate widespread election fraud? that's
something that might have been useful. Whatever happened to him, anyway? Just kind of faded
away. No support from Drumpf. Last I heard, Kobach was held in contempt of court for failing to
adequately advise noncitizens of their "right" to vote:
And Steve King -- sure, he was initially a Cruz supporter, but backed Trump enthusiastically
later on. King's mild civic nationalism and strong support for common sense, patriotic
immigration reform are exactly the agenda that Trump claimed to support. But when the
corporate "news" media and the entire Uniparty attacked Steve King as "inadequately anti-White"
-- Trump did <a href+' https://www.timesofisrael.com/white-house-distances-itself-from-king-comments/"was
quick to disavow. King's longstanding
fanatical
Israel Firstism did nothing to save him. It's not enough to support semitic supremacism in
the current year; you have to be actively anti-White as well, goy.
Zemurray's original name was Schmuel Zmurri. He was born in Kishinev, Bessarabia, Russia
(present-day Chişinău, Moldova) to a poor Jewish family that emigrated
to America when he was fourteen years old.
In early 20th century, he went to Honduras to take over the banana crop business. He hired
pe0ple to do a coup for his business interests in 1910.
@Rufus Clyde Too group
has been around for more than a decade. It was very clever to imply they were deeply involved
and have them seem to be the originators of the predator exposures and firings.
Also, think it a coincidence that so many Repubs in Congress either "retired",
decided to do something else or whose campaigns weren't going to be funded by the RNC in 2018?
NO. They were forced out because they were corrupt.
Think Guliani bothered to go spend weeks in Ukraine just for vacation? NO, he went to get
firsthand evidence of the Biden corruption. Etc, etc ..
@Zarathustra "Trump did
for the jew as much as he could."
How does the cliche go? Live by the jew, die by the jew? Parasites are not known for their
loyalty. The tribe squeezed all it could out of their useful idiot, Donnie the Dummy, and then
deftly jumped to a new host, Joey Depends, who will willingly advance the tribe's self-serving
agenda in ways yet undreamed of even by the political cognoscenti. Donnie appears to be a
vindictive old bitch and might just form a populist third party along the lines of Teddy
Roosevelt's moronic Bull Moose now that the tribe has discarded him like a wad of used stained
toilet paper.
@Zarathustra he Jews and
being vetted by them. He was a loose cannon and had to go.
I further believe that war with China is more likely under Biden than Trump. The U.S. dollar
has been the reserve currency since right after WWII. The rise of China threatens that so China
will eventually have to be dealt with militarily. The Jews must maintain the U.S. dollar as
reserve currency else much of their ill gotten gains tend to evaporate over time.
I am positive that local Jews have large investments in China.
That one I have no information on. It could well be true.
Multiculturalism has always been a stopgap, a temporary pause on the way to disintegration
for empires. The elites always put their hopes in it imagining they will satisfy angry
minorities with minor adjustments. It never works. Just look at the Black armed militias. Not
even systematic Black privilege n Supremacism is enough for them. They won't stop even for
Biden until they ethnically cleanse whites completely from large parts of the country dominate
the rest. We are past elections now. The war has begun.
The stage is set for another false flag with everyone distracted and caught up with the
plandemic and/or political unrest, and regardless of which puppet gets selected, the
Ziocorporate regime is certain to be rolling out more AI and tech to manipulate, control and
frame the masses. The "anti-semitic terrorism" angle of Islamism now colluding with neo-Nazi
white supremacism is as hilarious as it is scary, considering the US/EU Ziocorporate terrorist
regimes' recent interventions in Libya, Syria and Ukraine and the sudden rise in ISlamist
events in NATO/EU countries. This late stage fusion of imperial capitalism with communism in
the West is looking like a complete disaster for mankind.
@Katrinka in droves, but
there is massive fraud going on in GA, NC, NV, AZ, PA, WI and MI, as well as all the blue
states. Not only are votes miscounted, ballots conjured out of thin air for Biden, I suspect
many are also voting illegally since the DMV that registers voters in these states have no
capacity to check their citizenship status. The GOP needs to form an election integrity
committee and conduct a thorough audit of every state to verify their voters' eligibility. It
is a massive undertaking, but it must be done. There is no integrity left in our election
system.
The DNC should rename themselves the EJM, the End Justifies Means party. Democrats are a
bunch of shameless frauds.
It's so simple most don't even see it. American Jews are Trotskyites and Israeli Jews are
Stalinists. That's it Bolshevism 101, come to think of it there is no 102. It seems Mr. Trump
did not choose wisely.
"... Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent books are Bernie and the Sandernistas: Field Notes From a Failed Revolution and The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink (with Joshua Frank) He can be reached at: [email protected] or on Twitter @ JSCCounterPunch . ..."
+ The outcome is still in play, but if Biden loses, we're going to hear a lot of Malarky
about why and most of it will be bullshit. (When I called it a night, at 2am Left Coast Time,
Biden had come back to claim to a narrow lead in Wisconsin.)
+ I predicted in my column last Friday that the polls were underestimating Trump's support
(or voter indifference to Biden) by 3 percent. It looks more like 5 to 6 percent in many of the
decisive states. In Wisconsin, for example, Biden was favored by 8 percent. At 2Am, he was
leading by 0.3 percent. The elite consultants and pollsters may have fucked up more profoundly
than the Democrats who relied upon their statistical sorcery.
+ In the midst of a killer pandemic and mass unemployment, the Democrats could have offered
the nation a universal health care plan, a moratorium on evictions and a guaranteed basic
income. Instead, they believed that the key to victory over Trump was to meld neoliberal
economics with a neoconservative foreign policy. I don't know where they got this idea.
Probably, the same place Obama got his health insurance plan, the Heritage Foundation.
+ The Democrats' candidate voted for the Iraq war, NAFTA, the destruction of welfare, helped
instigate the war on drugs, wrote federal crime laws that incarcerated two generations of young
black & brown Americans and has preached austerity his entire political career. I'm not
surprised by the inconclusive results of an election which should have been a sure thing.
+ I've long argued that Biden was a weaker candidate than HRC, who was terrible. At least
HRC had a rationale for her campaign. Biden had none. The argument was that Biden wasn't hated
as much as Hillary. Perhaps. But most people just didn't feel anything about him. Which is
fatal for a politician.
+ Look on the bright side. Just think how much money the DNC will raise off of a Biden
loss
+ Trump's 2am speech was worthy of Somoza's infamous declaration, "Yes, you won the
election. But I won the counting."
+ Trump says he will be going to the U.S. Supreme Court to stop ALL vote counting across the
country. "As far as I am concerned, we have already won," Trump says.
+ Trump says a sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise those who voted for him. Sad,
indeed.
+ By contrast, Biden's passive speech sounded like Tsar Alexander's the night before the
battle of Austerlitz, completely unaware of the concussive force that's going to hit him in the
morning .
+ Biden is speaking, but saying nothing. Biden should never speak. Ever.
+ Recall how Biden spent most of the early primary season telling people, most of them young
progressives, to vote for someone else if they didn't like his reactionary policies?
Surprise!
+ Biden, who spent much of the year recruiting war criminals from the Bush administration,
did worse with Republicans than HRC did in 2016.
+ Remember the Zoom election simulation the New Yorker did that got Jeffrey Toobin so
excited? Do you think this was the scenario that triggered him?
+ The Biden campaign preferred to court the exiled neocons who started the Iraq war, than
Hispanics and progressives. They may not lose, but they probably deserve to
+ Back in May, the Biden campaign announced that they didn't consider Latinos a key part of
their " path to
victory. " This kind of arrogance yielded the predictable results.
+ Hispanic voters per early 2020 exit polls:
Florida:
2016: Clinton +27
2020: Biden +8
Georgia:
2016: Clinton +40
2020: Biden +25
Ohio:
2016: Clinton +41
2020: Biden +24
+ The results from Starr County, Texas, the most Latino county in the United States (96%
Latino) and the second poorest in Texas, with a poverty rate of 33%. In 2016, it went for
Clinton by 60 percent. In 2020, Biden won it by only 5 percent, with >98%
reporting.
+ The argument against Bernie was that he'd never win the Cuban exile vote in Florida.
+ I guess that Ana Navarro gambit was a bust
+ Biden kept saying this was a fight for the "soul of the nation". What if the nation never
had a soul and it was actually a fight for health care, jobs, and a livable climate?
+ We were told that this election was all about "saving democracy" and in order to save
democracy, the Democrats had to rig their primaries for Biden.
+ I was never a big fan of Sanders. But he gave people policies to vote for. Biden ran away
from all them and offered nothing of substance on his own. The best he had to offer was Kamala
Harris, a hard-ass former prosecutor who progressives distrusted and the right could race-bait
and caricaturize as the second coming of Angela Davis.
+ Still, it's easy to proclaim that Bernie would have won. It's a proposition that can't be
proven. But he would have been shackled by the same party apparatus that failed to win the
senate and lost ground in the House. Until the Democratic Party itself is reconstituted, it's
electoral fortunes are going to continue to erode.
+ Had the feeling the night might go south for the Democrats when the first crop of exit
polls came out showing that 48% of voters believed the
COVID pandemic was under control .
+ Trump, at 63,085,022 votes, has already amassed more votes than in 2016.
+ According to the early exit polls, Trump did better in 2020 with every race and gender
except . white men!
Change from 2016:
White Men -5
White Women +2
Black Men +4
Black Women +4
Latino Men +3
Latino Women +3
Other +5
+ Clearly, this election would have been a Trump rout without the intervention of COVID.
+ This symbolizes the entire night Republican David Andahl, a North Dakota legislator who
died of COVID-19,
won re-election .
+ Good news for the squad, plus Cori Bush, who also won. Their victories are, of course,
also good news for FoxNews, which can spend the next two years scaremongering
them
+ 26 out of the 30 nationally-endorsed Democratic Socialist candidates won their
elections.
+ Meanwhile, Scott DesJarlais slept with subordinates, prescribed opioids for his young
lover-patients and pressured one to get an abortion, still won in Tennessee, running as a
pro-life, family values Republican
+ Looks like the awful Prop 22 will pass in California, cementing drivers' status as
independent contractors as Uber, Doordash and other gig companies prevail in their $200M bid to
defeat legislation making them employees.
+ Memo to Justice Barrett: "Louisiana has passed Amendment 1, which establishes there is no
constitutional right to an abortion."
+ Georgia is still in play and could go for both Biden and Q, thus spawning a decade's worth
of new conspiracy theories
+ It turns out, the only debate Biden seems to have won was the one that was canceled.
+ The Democrats can't blame the Greens this time (though I'm sure they'll find some reason
to hurl insults at Susan Sarandon), having gotten them kicked off the ballot in key states.
Perhaps they'll blame the Libertarians for not pulling enough votes from Trump.
+ Go figure .Trump did better in counties with high COVID death rates than he did in
2016.
+ Trump stomped Biden in Florida, yet the state overwhelmingly passed a $15 minimum wage
referendum.
+ Florida Polls are the statistician's version of Florida Man
+ Biden had hopes of winning Iowa, but this once Democratic state is slipping further and
further away
2000: Gore by 0.32%
2004: Bush by 0.67%
2008: Obama by 8.5%
2012: Obama by 5.6%
2016: Trump by 9.3%
2020: Trump by 8%
+ It was a good night for drugs. Oregon becomes the first state to decriminalize low-level
drug possession and to legalize the use of magic mushrooms.
+ South Dakota, Arizona, Montana, New Jersey all legalized marijuana at the ballot box
tonight, a policy which isn't supported by either major party.
+ This polling reinforces my view that if Biden loses, it will be because he spent too much
time campaigning and not enough time staying out of sight "Two-thirds of voters say their
choice for president was driven by their opinion of President Trump," according to
AP VoteCast .
+ The EU is keeping Americans on
the no fly list , which is probably prudent given all the celebrities who've vowed to flee
the States in the event of Trump's reelection.
+ All Quiet on the Lincoln Project Front?
+ The Lincoln Project raised $67 million. Republican Voters Against Trump raised another $10
million. 93% of Republicans voted for Trump in 2020, up from 90% in 2016.
"... The financial elites disproportionately lavished their support on the Democrats. The oligarchs understood more clearly than certain elements of the left where their class interests reside. "Wall Street," Politico ..."
"... While the outcome of the presidential election is uncertain, the legitimacy of the ruling class has surely been sullied by the arguably ugliest campaign in recent history. The elite club must now figure out how to anoint their new emperor without further damaging their image. The hiccups over their transfer of power is their dilemma and our good fortune. ..."
The polls closed with "
no winner yet in cliffhanger presidential election," as of Wednesday evening. Despite a
period of uncertainty, which is typically the nemesis of
Wall Street , the Dow climbed 0.9%, the S&P 500 opened 1.5% higher, and the Nasdaq
Composite jumped 2.6%.
The explanation is that the financial elites know that they win regardless of who occupies
the Oval Office, which is something that some
leftists , who had advocated temporarily subordinating an independent working-class
alternative to campaign for the leading neoliberal candidate, did not firmly grasp.
Trouncing the contender that Noam Chomsky hyperbolically called " worse than Hitler " would be a blow to overt
white supremacy. But bedrock institutional racism, entombed in the US carceral state, will
still endure and the tasks of the left will remain.
Legitimizing neoliberal rule
The left's vote was not needed to ensure a Biden victory. But it was needed to justify
voting for the "lesser evil" based on the false narrative of TINA – "there is no
alternative."
The Revolutionary Communist Party, normally marginalized by the corporate media, received
banner headlines
when it declared for Biden. The "paper of record" for the Democratic wing of the two-party
duopoly, TheNew York Times, opportunistically posted an op-ed by a
self-described socialist because it pleaded , "leftists should
vote for Biden in droves."
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) readily
acknowledged "there is no choice at the top of the ticket that would advance our movement
or constitute a 'victory' for democratic socialism." But that did not deter them from jumping
on the Biden bandwagon. DSA seemed more worried about Biden losing than about Sanders being
excluded by the DNC.
It is not the left's responsibility to strategize how the Democrats could have run this or
future campaigns. Incidentally, a Biden/Harris victory would preclude a liberalish Democrat,
such as a member of the Squad , making a run as
the Democratic standard bearer for next 12 to 16 years.
The contribution of those parttime leftists who campaigned for Biden was not to put him into
the White House – they didn't have the numbers to do that – but to help legitimize
neoliberal rule. Their preemptive political surrender obscured the failure of a political
system incapable of addressing the critical issues of our times.
Politics of fear obscured critical issues
Fear was the operational motivator for
apocalyptic fantasies of a fascist coup, which served to obviate a progressive agenda. A
tanking economy, a still uncontained pandemic, and unprecedented protests against racialized
police brutality were attributed solely to Trump's watch, instead of being understood as also
endemic to the neoliberal order.
Neither presidential candidate advocated comprehensive healthcare in a time of pandemic,
with both in effect opting for
triage of the most vulnerable –
people of color and the
elderly . The two wings of the duopoly mainly differ on this existential health issue over
the advisability of wearing
face masks .
Climate catastrophe remains an existential threat. Biden may throw a few more crumbs than
Trump in the direction of the alternative energy industry. But both candidates contested to see
who was more enthusiastic about fracking
, while they agree that tax cuts and subsidies to the fossil fuel industry will be continued.
Biden's predecessor, whom he served as VP,
boasted "we've added enough new oil and gas pipeline to circle the Earth and then some."
The next four years portends a choice of someone who denies global warming or another who
believes in the science but does not act on it.
The
financial elites disproportionately lavished their support on the Democrats. The oligarchs
understood more clearly than certain elements of the left where their class interests reside.
"Wall Street," Politicoreported ,
grew "giddy about Biden," because Uncle Joe would best help recover their legitimacy while
carrying their water. The financiers also hedged their bets with contributions to Trump. Along
with the DNC, they understood that another four years of the current occupant would be better
than a Bernie Sanders presidency for the owning class.
Game of Thrones
While the outcome of the presidential election is uncertain, the legitimacy of the
ruling class has surely been sullied by the arguably ugliest campaign in recent history. The
elite club must now figure out how to anoint their new emperor without further damaging their
image. The hiccups over their transfer of power is their dilemma and our good fortune.
It may be too early to tell, but the widely feared Trump coup has yet to be realized. The
Proud Boys, with their mail-order munitions, have yet to replace the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Nervous leftists, apprehensive about a Trump coup, are calling upon labor to wage a
general strike to install a neoliberal into the White House. Joe Hill would find that
ironic at best.
While "President Donald Trump has cast doubt on whether he will commit to a peaceful
transfer of power," CNN revealed
, "the secretive process to prepare a would-be Biden administration has been underway for
months with help from top Trump officials (emphasis added)."
Biden may now be less unpalatable than Trump, but Uncle Joe had the advantage of not being
in power for the last four years. He may not look so hot after another term of neoliberal rule,
characterized by increasing austerity for working people, entrenched institutional racism,
oppressive surveillance and security state measures, and an aggressive imperialism abroad.
Substantial differences exist between Trump and Biden, but those differences do not extend to
which class they serve.
Recovering the left alternative
With record turnout ,
never before have so many voted for so little. Now is auspicious for alternatives to the
two-party duopoly.
As reported
by Alan Mcleod, Trump's abysmal approval rating of 42% is barely edged out by Biden's of 46%.
Two-thirds of prospective Democratic voters polled claim they would be voting against Trump
rather than for Biden; only a quarter of the prospective Republicans are voting so much for
Trump as against the Democrats. Biden way squeak through on the appeal of not being Trump, but
that will wear thin quickly.
With both major parties continuing to abandon the interests of working people, the left must
either take the initiative or surrender it to a growing right wing. Rather than this being the
time when never before has there been a greater need to support the lesser-evil Democrats and
give them an
extraordinary mandate to rule , this is a time to leverage the ruling class's loss of
legitimacy to articulate a left alternative.
Taking a left initiative, despite the loss of legitimacy of the ruling elites, is
challenging. With a Republican victory, the left has historically gotten absorbed into a
resistance that devolves into an assistance – the
graveyard of social movements that is the Democratic Party. With a Democratic victory, the
illusion of hope and that anyone's better than Trump are false excuses to "give Biden a
chance." After campaigning for the Democrat, it will be problematic for these same left forces
to credibly do an about-face and fight him. As for an independent electoral left, more rigorous
party registration rules targeting left alternatives, recently imposed by Democrats , foreshadow fewer left
choices on future ballots.
However, the
majority of working people support a progressive agenda, which has been ignored and
suppressed by the duopoly:
Effectively addressing global warming
COVID safety over economic activity and economic relief
Ending forever wars and sanctions, while de-escalating the threat of nuclear
conflagration
National healthcare program modelled after Medicare
Opposition to the militarization of the police and preservation of civil liberties
Reduction of income inequality, stronger anti-trust laws, and fairly taxing wealth
These were among the critical issues that were lost in the distracting political theatre of
the 2020 campaign and the basis for a renewed left initiative.
If one cares about the stability of the United States then they should have been wishing for
a decisive victory in yesterday's election. A decisive victory for whom you ask? Perhaps in the
long run that could be relevant, but in the short term it really doesn't matter at all, the
main thing is that someone needs to walk away as the undisputed champion for the sake of
America.
Not only has the United States had a very solid track record of stability due to having the
best possible geopolitical location on the planet, but also in part thanks to the wisdom of
those within the two-party system to value said stability over a temporary victory time after
time.
Image: is getting rid of Trump really worth killing the golden goose? For some apparently
it is.
As a teenager any thinking American will quickly wake up to the fact that with " Hanging Chads ", Gerrymandering , and rumors of
the dead and non-citizens voting, that our electoral system is at least highly and deeply
flawed if not completely illegitimate. With all the "irregularities" that happen in November it
seems to young minds that this is simply a massive farce that needs to end.
However, as one gets older we can see the wisdom in both American parties constantly
cheating and yet acknowledging every election as legit, even during the bizarre final moments
of the battle like those between Bush and Gore in Florida . The two-party
system must have gotten the picture that both teams are going to do anything they can to win
and that this is perfectly natural. But in turn, just because both teams cheat there is no
reason to declare the competition to be illegitimate as a whole, lest we repeat the U.S. Civil
War or the early days in the Russian Revolution in which many factions fought till there could
"be only one". Accepting that both sides can and will cheat but they must acknowledge the
winner is critical for American stability and perfectly reasonable to those of us with grey
hair.
Image: The dangerous electoral situation at the time of writing (source: Fox
News)
The issue at hand in 2020 is that this old wisdom of how to play the game in Washington is
dying or dead. Both sides are signaling to the other that they will not acknowledge a peaceful
transfer/retaining of power . And
just a day before voting, suburban soccer mom extremist Nancy Pelosi said that the House is
ready to decide who will become President if the elections are "disputed" i.e. they are
prepared to bureaucratically make Biden become President of the United States. This type of
rhetoric could have big consequences for America as a whole.
With ballots still left to be counted, Trump says, in his usual exaggerated assuredness,
that
'Frankly, (his side) did win this election' and is already making plans to go to the
Supreme Court. This seems to be really jumping the gun, perhaps he knows about things happening
behind the scenes that we do not, or he is simply no better than Pelosi when it comes to
keeping their yap shut.
Image: Nancy Pelosi does not seem concerned about risking American stability for a
presidential party victory.
So far the official threats that we have heard are all focussed on using bureaucratic
procedures against each other, but with BLM, Antifa and other forces already out on the streets
and possibly awaiting orders, certain observing forces could throw gasoline on the fire at any
moment. Violence on a non-organized/revolutionary level has already started (as expected) with
4 Trump
supporters being stabbed .
This is why the results of the election as they stand at this moment are the worst they
could possibly be – as a strong victory for either would almost certainly guarantee the
United States would remain stable for at least another 4 years. The "score" we are seeing right
now is fertile ground for Color Revolution like action.
We should not forget that Color Revolutions happen almost always in connection with hot
election cycles and take place in the nation's capital with full media support on the side of
the rebels. All these check boxes are currently ticked and if cooler heads don't prevail
Americans will get to experience the lifestyle, violence and fear they brought to the former
Soviet Union after it lost the Cold War via the CIA's/State Department's Color Revolutions.
It is imperative for cooler heads on both sides to remind their colleagues that America did
not become a super power due to "exceptionalism" but instead thanks to location, certain
opportunities (WWII), and select wise policies.
Then again if you are an Accelarationist, well, it looks like your moment has finally come.
The Right and Left are playing chicken and it doesn't look like anyone is going to blink.
Not that long ago the United States came close to total dissolution.
The financial system was bankrupt, speculation had run amok, and all infrastructure had
fallen into disarray over the course of 30 years of unbroken free trade. To make matters worse,
the nation was on the verge of a civil war and international financiers in London and Wall
Street gloated over the immanent destruction of the first nation on earth to be established not
upon hereditary institutions, but rather on the consent of the governed and mandated to serve
the general welfare.
Although one might think that I am referring now to today's America, I am in fact referring
to the United States of 1860.
The Trifold Deep State
In my past
two articles in this series, I discussed how a new system of political economy was
established by Benjamin Franklin and his disciples in the wake of the war of independence
driven by protectionism, national banking and internal improvements.
I also demonstrated that the rise of the thing known as today's "deep state" can also be
understood as a three-headed beast which arose in its earliest incarnation under the leadership
of arch traitor Aaron Burr who established Wall Street, killed Alexander Hamilton and devoted
his life to the cause of dissolving the union. After having been caught in the act of sabotage,
Burr escaped arrest in 1807 by running off to England where he live in Jeremy Bentham's mansion
for 5 years, only to return to oversee a new plot to break up the union that eventually boiled
over in 1860.
The three prongs of the operation that Burr led on behalf of British intelligence and which
remains active to this very day, can loosely be described as follows:
The Eastern Establishment families sometimes known as the Essex Junto who took control of
Hamilton's Federalist Party. These were Empire Loyalists who remained within the USA under
the illusion of loyalty to the constitution, but always adherent to a British Imperial world
order and devoted to eventually undermining it from within. These were the circles that
brought the USA into Britain's Opium trade against China as junior partners in crime and who
promoted the dissolution of the union as early as 1800
under the leadership of Aaron Burr.
The "Virginia Junto", slave owning aristocracy which also worked with Aaron Burr in his
1807 secessionist plot and whose alliance with the British Empire was instrumental in its
rise to power from 1828-1860. This was the structure that soon returned to power, after the
civil war, under the guiding hand of such
Mazzini-connected "Young Americans" as KKK founder Albert Pike and the Southern
establishment that later executed nationalist presidents in 1880, 1901 and in 1963.
Some Uncomfortable Questions
The story has been told of Lincoln's murder in tens of thousands of books and yet more often
than not the narrative of a "single lone gunman" is imposed onto the story by researchers who
are either too lazy or too corrupt to look for the evidence of a larger plot.
How many of those popular narratives infused into the western zeitgeist over the decades
even acknowledge the simple fact that John Wilkes Boothe was carrying a $500 bank draft signed
by Ontario Bank of Montreal President Henry Starnes (later to become Montreal Mayor) when he
was shot dead at Garrett Farm on April 26, 1865?
How many people have been exposed to the vast Southern Confederacy secret service operations
active throughout the civil war in Montreal, Toronto and Halifax which was under the firm
control of Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin and his handlers in British
intelligence?
How many people know that Boothe spent at least 5 weeks in the fall of 1864 in Montreal
associating closely with the highest echelons of British and Southern intelligence including
Starnes, and confederate spy leaders Jacob Thompson and George Sanders?
Demonstrating his total ignorance of the process that controlled him, Booth wrote to a
friend on October 28, 1864: "I have been in Montreal for the last 3 or 4 weeks and no one
(not even myself) knew when I would return".
On The Trail of the Assassins
After Lincoln was murdered, a manhunt to track down the intelligence networks behind the
assassination was underway that eventually led to the hanging of four low level co-conspirators
who history has shown were just as much patsies as John Wilkes Boothe.
Days later, President Johnson issued a proclamation saying :
"It appears from evidence in the Bureau of Military Justice that the murder of Abraham
Lincoln [was] incited, concerted, and procured by and between Jefferson Davis, late of
Richmond, Va., and Jacob Thompson, Clement C. Clay, [Nathaniel] Beverly Tucker, George N.
Sanders, William C. Cleary, and other rebels and traitors against the government of the United
States harbored in Canada."
Two days before Booth was shot, Secretary of War
Edwin Stanton wrote : "This Department has information that the President's murder was
organized in Canada and approved at Richmond."
Knowledge of Canada's confederate operations was well known to the federal authorities in
those days even though the majority among leading historians today are totally ignorant of this
fact.
George Sanders remains one of the most interesting figures among Booth's handlers in Canada.
As a former Ambassador to England under the presidency of Franklin Pierce (1853-1857), Sanders
was a close friend of international anarchist Giuseppe Mazzini – the founder of the Young
Europe movement. Sanders who wrote "Mazzini and Young Europe" in 1852, had the honor of being
a leading member of the
southern branch of the Young America Movement (while Ralph Waldo Emerson was a
self-proclaimed leader of the
northern branch of Young America ). Jacob Thompson, who was named in the Johnson dispatch
above, was a former Secretary of the Interior under President Pierce, handler of Booth and
acted as the top controller of the Confederacy secret service in Montreal.
As the book Montreal City of
Secrets (2017), author Barry Sheehy proves that not only was Canada the core of Confederate
Secret Services, but also coordinated a multi pronged war from the emerging "northern
confederacy" onto Lincoln's defense of the union alongside Wall Street bankers while the
president was fighting militarily to stop the southern secession. Sheehy writes: "By 1863,
the Confederate Secret Service was well entrenched in Canada. Funding came from Richmond via
couriers and was supplemented by profits from blockade running."
The Many Shapes of War from the North
Although not having devolved to direct military engagement, the Anglo-Canadian war on the
Union involved several components:
Financial warfare: The major Canadian banks dominant in the 19 th century were
used not only by the confederacy to pay British operations in the construction of war ships,
but also to receive much needed infusions of cash from British Financiers throughout the war. A
financial war on Lincoln's greenback was waged under the control of Montreal based confederate
bankers John Porterfield and George Payne and also JP Morgan to "short" the greenback.
By 1864, the subversive traitor Salmon Chase had managed to tie the greenback to a (London
controlled) gold standard thus making its value hinge upon gold speculation. During a vital
moment of the war, these financiers coordinated a mass "sell off" of gold to London driving up
the price of gold and collapsing the value of the U.S. dollar crippling Lincoln's ability to
fund the war effort.
Direct Military intervention Thwarted: As early as 1861, the Trent Crisis nearly
induced a hot war with Britain when a union ship intervened onto a British ship in
international waters and arrested two high level confederate agents en route to London. Knowing
that a two-fold war at this early stage was unwinnable, Lincoln pushed back against hot heads
within his own cabinet who argued for a second front saying "one war at a time". Despite this
near miss, London wasted no time deploying over 10 000 soldiers to Canada for the duration of
the war ready to strike down upon the Union at a moment's notice and kept at bay in large
measure due to the bold intervention of the
Russian fleet to both Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the USA . This was a clear message to
both England and to Napoleon III's France (who were stationed across the Mexican border)
to
stay out of America's war.
Despite Russia's intervention, Britain continued to build warships for the Confederacy which
devastated the Union navy during the war and which England had to pay $15.5 million to the USA
in 1872 under
the Alabama Claims.
Terrorism: It is less well known today than it was during the 19 th century that
confederate terror operations onto the north occurred throughout the civil war with raids on
Union POW camps, efforts to burn popular New York hotels, blowing up ships on the Mississippi,
and the infamous St Albans raid of October 1964 on Vermont and attacks on Buffalo, Chicago,
Sandusky, Ohio, Detroit, and Pennsylvania. While the St Albans raiders were momentarily
arrested in Montreal, they were soon released under the logic that they represented a
"sovereign state" at conflict with another "sovereign state" with no connection with Canada
(perhaps a lesson can be learned here for Meng Wanzhou's lawyers?).
Assassination: I already mentioned that a $550 note was found on Boothe's body with the
signature of Ontario Bank president Henry Starnes which the failed actor would have received
during his October 1864 stay in Montreal. What I did not mention is that Booth stayed at the St
Lawrence Hall Hotel which served as primary headquarters for the Confederacy from 1863-65.
Describing the collusion of Northern Copperheads, anti-Lincoln republicans, and Wall Street
agents, Sheehy writes: "All of these powerful northerners were at St. Lawrence Hall rubbing
elbows with the Confederates who used the hotel as an unofficial Headquarters. This was the
universe in which John Wilkes Booth circulated in Canada."
In a 2014 expose , historian Anton Chaitkin, points out that the money used by Boothe came
directly from a $31,507.97 transfer from London arranged by the head of European confederate
secret service chief James D. Bulloch. It is no coincidence that Bulloch happens to also be the
beloved uncle and mentor of the same Teddy Roosevelt who became the president over the dead
body of Lincoln-follower William McKinley (assassinated in 1901).
In his expose, Chaitkin wrote:
"James D. Bulloch was the maternal uncle, model and strategy-teacher to future U.S.
President Theodore Roosevelt. He emerged from the shadows of the Civil War when his nephew
Teddy helped him to organize his papers and to publish a sanitized version of events in his
1883 memoir, The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe. Under the protection of
imperial oligarchs such as Lord Salisbury and other Cecil family members, working in tandem
with Britain's military occupation of its then-colony Canada, Bulloch arranged English
construction and crewing for Confederate warships that notoriously preyed upon American
commerce."
The Truth is Buried Under the Sands of History
While four low level members of Booth's cell were hanged on July 7, 1865 after a four month
show trial (1), the actual orchestrators of Lincoln's assassination were never brought to
justice with nearly every leading member of the confederate leadership having escaped to
England in the wake of Lincoln's murder. Even John Surrat (who was among the eight who faced
trial) avoided hanging when his case was dropped, and his $25 000 bail was mysteriously paid by
an anonymous benefactor unknown to this day. After this, Surrat escaped to London where the
U.S. Consuls demands for his arrest were ignored by British authorities.
Confederate spymaster Judah Benjamin escaped arrest and lived out his days as a Barrister in
England, and Confederate President Jefferson Davies speaking to adoring fans in Quebec in June
1867 encouraged the people to reject the spread of republicanism and instead embrace the new
British Confederation scheme that would soon be imposed
weeks later . Davies spoke to the Canadian band performing Dixie at the Royal Theater:
"I hope that you will hold fast to their British principles and that you may ever strive to
cultivate close and affectionate connections with the mother country".
With the loss of Lincoln, and the 1868 death of Thaddeus Stevens, Confederate General
Albert Pike established restoration of the southern oligarchy and sabotage of Lincoln's
restoration with the rise of the KKK, and renewal of Southern Rite Freemasonry. Over the
ensuing years, an all out assault was launched on Lincoln's Greenbacks culminating in the
Specie Resumption Act of 1875 tying the U.S. financial system to British "hard money"
monetarism and paving the way for the later financial coup known as the Federal Reserve Act of
1913 (2).
While the Southern Confederacy plot ultimately failed, Britain's "other confederacy
operation launched in 1864 was successfully consolidated with the British
North America Act of July 1, 1867. The hoped-for extension of trans continental rail lines
through British Columbia and into Alaska and Russia were sabotaged as told in the
Real Story Behind the Alaska Purchase of 1867.
Instead of witnessing a new world system of sovereign nation states under a multipolar order
of collaboration driven by international infrastructure projects as Lincoln's followers like
William Seward, Ulysses Grant, William Gilpin and President McKinley envisioned , a new age
of war and empire re-asserted itself throughout the 20 th century.
It was this same trifold Deep State that contended with Franklin Roosevelt and his patriotic
Vice President Henry Wallace for power during the course of WWII, and
it was this same beast that ran the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. As New
Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison demonstrated in his book On the Trail of the Assassins (1991 ),
Kennedy's murder was arranged by a complex assassination network that brought into play
Southern secret intelligence assets in Louisiana, and Texas, Wall Street financiers, and a
strange assassination bureau based in Montreal named Permindex under the leadership of Maj.
Gen. Louis Mortimer Bloomfield. This was the same intelligence operation that grew out of
MI6's Camp X in Ottawa
during WWII and changed its name but not its functions during the Cold War. This is the
same British Imperial complex that has been attempting to undo the watershed moment of 1776 for
over 240 years.
It is this same tumor in the heart of the USA that has invested everything in a gamble to
put their senile tool Joe Biden into the seat of the Presidency and oust the first genuinely
nationalist American president the world has seen in nearly 60 years.
Exclusive: How The Bidens Made Off With Millions In Chinese Cash
New
documents show that as regulators closed in, Hunter struck a fresh deal with his Chinese partners
World Food Program USA Board Chairman Hunter Biden speaks at the World Food Program USA's Annual McGovern-Dole Leadership
Award Ceremony at Organization of American States on April 12, 2016 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for
World Food Program USA)
The Senate's
report
on
Hunter Biden's activities released several months ago, which was
spun
by
the New York Times as having shown "no evidence of wrongdoing," nevertheless had several important gaps in the business
activities of the troubled son of the former vice president.
Draft legal documents and 2017 bank records obtained by The American Conservative show at least $5 million was transferred to
Hunter and Jim Biden from companies associated with the Chinese conglomerate CEFC, with millions coming after the company had
come under legal scrutiny both in the United States and China.
CEFC official Patrick Ho was arrested in November 2017 and charged by the Southern District of New York with corruption, and
was convicted last year. In addition, on or about March 1, 2018, CEFC Chairmen Ye Jianming was arrested in China for economic
crimes and hasn't been seen since. CEFC assets in China were seized by Chinese state agencies. In the U.S., major
beneficiaries were Hunter and Jim Biden.
What the following documents show is that as regulators moved to seize CEFC's assets, Hunter Biden attempted to take control
of the company founded in partnership with it. Instead, after striking a deal with two CEFC employees in the U.S., the funds
were disbursed over the next six months to his and his uncle's companies until it was all gone, in total at least $5 million.
2017 Bank Records
On August 5, 2017, the Bidens and CEFC entered into a 50-50 limited liability company agreement (Hudson West III) between
Owasco, Hunter Biden's company, and Hudson West V (CEFC). The Sep 22, 2020 report from the Senate Judiciary Committee (the
"HGSAC Report") surmised an agreement like this, but a copy can be seen, for the first time
here
.
In early 2017, CEFC was ranked as one of the top 500 corporations in the world.
Hudson West III set up two bank accounts with Cathay Bank, with the first set up on or about August 5.
A
company associated with CEFC deposited $5 million into the account on August 8; no contribution was made by the Bidens.
On
Nov 2, 2017, CEFC Limited deposited a further $1 million into the account. (Subsequently, the Hudson West III account shows a
wire of $1 million back to CEFC Limited on Nov 21, followed a few days later on Nov 27 by a credit memo for $999,938. The
HGSAC Report interpreted the Nov 21 wire transfer as a return of the $1 million, but appear to have omitted consideration of
the credit memo apparently reversing the return).
The
net result is that CEFC and its affiliates deposited almost exactly $6 million into Hudson West III in 2017.
In the 5 months between August 8 and Dec 31, 2017, Hudson West III disbursed almost $1.6 million to Owasco (Hunter Biden) in
wire transfers and credit card binges by the Bidens. The transfers appear to have been structured as $165,000 in monthly
payments, plus two other payments of $400,000 and $220,387.
Collated
screengrabs from Hudson West III bank statements showing payments to Owasco (Wells Fargo Clearing Services LLC)
The HGSAC Report reported on the $99,000 credit card spree by the Bidens in early September 2017, but, in addition to that
spree, there was an additional $77,700 in credit card sprees, making a total of $176,700 for the five month period.
Figure
2. Screengrab from Hudson West III bank statements showing credit card disbursements
Total expenditures by Hudson West III in the five months were $1,947,439, of which $1,522,000 went to the Bidens (via Owasco
and credit cards).
Hudson
West III bank accounts contained more than $4 million in cash at the end of 2017.
March 2018 Deal
Shortly after the arrest of CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming on March 1, 2018, there appears to have been a rolling seizure of CEFC
assets. Even with the profligate spending by the Bidens, Hudson West III would still have had about $3.5 million in cash in
March.
On March 26, a Chinese-American employee who was fiercely loyal to Hunter suggested to him that Hunter and the two CEFC
employees in the U.S. (Mervyn Yan and Kevin Dong) figure out a way to appropriate the Hudson West III cash before it was
frozen by Chinese regulators or receivers:
you guys (You/Mervyn/Kevin)
figure out a way to have the money transferred to the right U.S. account before any restriction levied by Chinese
regulators or appointed new boss in charge of manage the enterprise Ye left behind.
In fact, Hunter had already begun the process of appropriating Hudson West III cash before a receiver could arrive. On March
18, Hunter's lawyer sent a letter to Mervyn Yan proposing that Hudson West V (the proximate CEFC entity) assign its interest
in Hudson West III to Owasco (Hunter), a transaction which would give control of all the cash to Hunter (see
here
,
and
here
).
On or about March 30, 2018, Hunter and the two Chinese appear to have worked out a different arrangement. Among the newly
available documents are redlined versions of an assignment agreement in which Hudson West V assigned its 50% interest in
Hudson West III to Coldharbour Capital Inc., with Kevin Dong the proposed signatory for Hudson West V, Mervyn Yan for
Coldharbour Capital and Hunter signatory for Owasco's consent to the assignment.
The HGSAC Report does not appear to have had access to these documents: they noted that ownership of Hudson West III at some
point was 50% Coldharbour, but does not appear to have been aware of the prior ownership of this interest by Hudson West V or
the assignment to Coldharbour in late March 2018.
During the next six months, the cash was completely drained into the accounts of Owasco and Coldharbour, spent on consulting
fees and expenses. According to the HGSAC Report, total payments from Hudson West III to Owasco amount to an astonishing
$4,790,375 by September 2018, when the Hudson West III accounts were totally depleted. In November 2018, Hudson West III was
dissolved by Owasco and Coldharbour.
From the 2017 bank records, we know that $1,444,000 had been transferred to Owasco in 2017 (excluding direct payment of credit
card sprees); thus, transfers to Owasco in the first eight months of 2018 were approximately $3,345,000.
The assignment of Hudson West V's interest in Hudson West III to Coldharbour and the dissipation of cash to the Hudson West
III managers would probably not have stood up to a determined receiver appointed by the Chinese parent company, but there
doesn't appear to have been any attempt by the parent company to stop or control the dissipation of Hudson West III's cash
reserves.
Lion Hall (Jim Biden)
Invoices
Included in the newly available material are invoices to Owasco and, separately, to Hudson West III from Jim Biden doing
business as Lion Hall Group. The HGSAC Report stated that, between Aug 14, 2017 and Aug 3, 2018, Owasco sent 20 wires totaling
$1,398,999 to Lion Hall Group. The newly available documents show that Jim Biden charged Owasco $82,500 per month as a
"monthly retainer for international business development":
Readers will recall that Hudson West III bank statements showed regular monthly payments of $165,000 for the last 5 months of
2017. The corollary is that Hunter split this regular monthly payment from Hudson West III 50:50 with Jim Biden. The HGSAC
Report notes that the payments to Lion Hall Group had been flagged by Owasco's bank (Wells Fargo) for potential criminal
activity. The new documents contain an inquiry email from Wells Fargo compliance, together with a reply from Hunter which was
unresponsive on the key compliance questions. By the time that Wells Fargo raised its compliance concerns, the Hudson West III
cash had been exhausted and with it, presumably the stream of 50-50 payments to Uncle Jim.
As noted above, in addition to the regular $165,000 monthly payments, Owasco received other large transfers in 2017 and
presumably in 2018. It is not known whether Uncle Jim split these 50-50 as well, or whether this was a side transaction by
Hunter.
Concurrent with this flood of
money from CEFC, Hunter continued to receive a lavish stipend from Burisma. Nonetheless, by the end of 2018, Hunter had
hundreds of thousands in tax liens. In March 2019, despite having received millions from Chinese business interests, Hunter
even had to plead with former partner Jeffrey Cooper to email him $100 for gas so that he wouldn't be stranded on the highway.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Arthur Bloom is editor of The American Conservative online. He was previously deputy editor of the Daily Caller
and a columnist for the Catholic Herald. He holds masters degrees in urban planning and American studies from
the University of Kansas. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The
Spectator
(UK),
The Guardian, Quillette, The American
Spectator
,
Modern Age, and Tiny Mix Tapes.
email
Not by the Conservative press. But certainly by the Liberal press. I was born in a country
where all the news sources were owned by one of the political parties. Now I live in a
country where we have the
de facto
situation. In
America we are very good at setting the standard as the
de
jure
state of affairs, while ignoring the
de facto
state
of affairs. Every country has its share of hypocrisy. But there are few places, if any, where
it is institutionalized as America. We need to do much better. Despite what the Conservatives
say, the Liberal press used to try to do journalism. But they have given up.
I'm old enough to remember when CNN was a pretty middle of the road news organization.
But Fox came along and proved that naked partisanship, half-truths, innuendo, and
brightening up the hate centers of the brain was a far more profitable way of doing
business. CNN just had to compete.
We do have the Fox "News" Network (Most watched cable news channel, or so the
continually brag, and with TV/cable being where most Americans get their news from that
makes them a pretty big player) and One America "News" Network. Ad in the Sinclair
Broadcasting Network--they have no problem sending out canned od-eds supporting Trump
so they should have no ideological objection to pursuing this story. Perhaps they could
do some investigating and reporting instead of filling their airtime with
unsubstantiated accusations made by others that they take at face value.
Not to mention there are some print sources--The Washington Times, the NY Post, the
Orange County Register, Des Moines Register, etc.
Right? Between Fox News, the Murdoch owned papers, Breitbart, the Daiky
Caller/Wire, and Sinclair, the idea that right isn't represented in the media is
frankly insane. Even Q Anon has a better reach in Facebook than the NYT and they
are a pure distillation of conservatism.
"There is no conservative media" is an idea about as tethered to reality as
conservative media is in general.
This is news. Hunter Biden is most likely a crook. And a well-known watchdog group has just filed a
12-page complaint with DOJ requesting an investigation. Also check out this TV appearance on
Newsmax.
Hunter Biden is most likely a crook. But what a person "most likely is" is not news. I used
to watch Newsmax because it is good to hear about stories that the liberal press doesn't
cover. And it is good to get varying perspectives on news events even if the liberal press
covers them. But I can't take tv news any more. They are all mostly useless for people like
me who detest both political parties. I watch only Newsy. You should try if you are really
interested in news.
"watchdog group" you say? And that is supposed to me make me think that there is a difference
between that and the Republican Party? The liberals pioneered that trick. Now everyone uses
it. That is, name (effectively) an arm of the Democratic Party a "watchdog" and that is
supposed to give it credibility. But the trick is subject to our First Law of Politics.
Whatever tactic one party deploys, as long as it is successful, the other party will deploy
it. No matter how much they denounced it previously. At best, they will rename it. But
usually, they don't bother.
In any case, unless this "watchdog group" is alleging a crime there is no basis for a DOJ
investigation. What is the criminal accusation?
I'm not gonna lie, I didn't even waste my time reading this piece. Arthur seems to have all of a
sudden become interested in corruption (which likely didn't even happen) in a way he expressed no
interest in for the last 4 years. Forgive me if I don't vote him as an honest broker.
It's just so weak. This isn't an October surprise -- this is like a turkey surprise casserole
served two weeks after Thanksgiving. Even if this were a game-changing piece of reporting, it
seems a dubious tactic to release it on the morning of the election on a website that
probably gets less views than some random 16 year old dancing on Tik-Tok.
TAC's pivot over the last couple years into Brietbart territory is embarrassing. A lot of rightwing
media and personalities held out for awhile on Trump, but eventually saw where the wind was blowing
and jumped in the deep end. I hope no one on the principled right or left ever lets them forget it.
No shelter for scoundrels....
Thanks for publishing this. I hope more such pieces appear here in the next few weeks. TAC's regular
readers from the Left don't like it. Good. Rub their noses in it.
I was mentioning Hunter Biden and his Ukraine dealings back in 2014 but I don't have a public forum
outside email and social media and no one thought it of interest till his dad was running for
president against a man who by many accounts has been a crook his entire adult life, and proud of
it.
So Hunter failed to register as a foreign agent. Isn't that what Mike Flynn got busted for
along with some other Trump campaign officials? And hasn't Trump demanded his people all be
forgiven for their transgressions cause it wasn't really a bad thing?
Out of curiosity, among the hundreds if not thousands of websites you could be reading right now,
apart from thousands of decent monographs and works of fiction, why are you spending time this
morning at this "nutjob site," going so far as to login to the comments section to express to the
other presumably "nut job" readers that you're better than them?
This speaks VOLUMES about your worth as a human being. When you wake up around 3 AM over the next
few nights, it'll hit you. Let it sink in. Let it marinate. From such truths character is built.
It's pretty extreme. TAC comment section has become unusable bickering and taunts even after
blocking half the content. I don't know what they are hoping to accomplish other than
confirming our worst guesses about their character.
Exclusive? Of course! No one in their right mind would print it. And the enemy of the state-fake news
outlets are all looking for scoops and looking to win major awards and prizes for breaking a
story-----and for some reason all of these thousands of journalists did not get this "exclusive."
all unproved nonsense.Where is the indictment, when, after all Trump and Barr woprk hand in hand...simply
BS stuff to support Trump. Should Trump lose, watch the legal stuff that he will confront. Now worry
about that
When did this site turn into The Tucker Carlson show ? Please return to the thoughtful conservative
thought that you are know for. Sign of the times I guess and how internet culture can demean us all.
It's the same delusion they engaged in with Trump. They overweight the feelings of their in
group and underweight the population as a whole. Tucker doesn't actually have many viewers in
the scheme of winning a national election. He couldn't appeal to moderates.
Neoconservatives are flocking to the Biden campaign. The DC braintrust that believes in
using US military power to aid Israel in the Middle East has jumped parties before– to
Clinton in '92, and back to Bush in 2000– and now they're hopping aisles to support
Biden, with Bill Kristol leading the way.
Last night on an official Biden campaign webinar led by "Jewish Americans for Biden", and
moderated by Ann Lewis of Democratic Majority for Israel, two prominent neocon Republicans
endorsed Biden, primarily because of Trump's character posing a danger to democracy. But both
neocons emphasized that Biden would be more willing to use force in the Middle East and
reassured Jewish viewers that Biden will seek to depoliticize Israel support, won't
necessarily return to the Iran deal and will surround himself with advisers who support
Israel and believe in American military intervention.
Eliot Cohen, a Bush aide and academic , echoed
the fear that Israel is being politicized. "A lot of Jews made a big mistake by taking
something I was in favor of, moving the embassy to Jerusalem and obsessing about that," he
said. But there was huge political risk in that: if the United States is internally divided,
at war with itself, and "Israel has become a partisan issue, which it should never ever be .
That's not in Israel's longterm security interest."
Biden will reverse that trend by appointing strong supporters of Israel, Cohen said.
"Joe Biden has a long record as a friend of Israel. I think we're both quite familiar
with the kinds of people who will go into a Biden administration and I think we feel very
comfortable that they will have a deep and abiding concern for Israel which is not going to
go away."
Edelman also said that Trump has created many "dangers" in the region by not being
aggressive:
"By withdrawing or threatening to withdraw US forces, by repeatedly not replying or
dealing with Iranian aggression in the Persian Gulf or against Saudi oil infrastructure,
he's created a sort of vacuum that is being filled in Libya by Russia and by Turkey "
Biden will work with allies and be ready to use U.S. military in the region– or as
Edelman said, "to play."
"The region is a mess," Edelman said. "And yet the president continually says he wants the
U.S. to withdraw from the region. The reality is that the withdrawal of US power form the
region has helped create this morass of threats."
He cited three war zones in which the U.S. or proxies' bombing is essential to U.S.
security, Libya, Yemen and Syria.
In Syria, "The Trump administration pulled out and said, we don't want to play here,"
Edelman said.
"Other forces are going to fill the vacuum created by the absence of US leadership and
they won't be benign forces," Edelman said. Iran, Russia, or Turkey will come in and create a
"vortex of instability that can potentially come back to haunt us" -- with terrorist attacks
or the disruption of energy markets.
Cohen and Edelman opposed Obama's Iran deal, and both predicted that Biden will be hawkish
on Iran.
In other words, Trump has failed the Israel Lobby because he has tried to pull our US forces
from the Middle East and, although he has laid down sanctions against Iran, he has not gone to
war. Of course, these are the people who promoted the ongoing disaster of the Iraq war. They
are probably right that Russia and Turkey would benefit from US pulling out completely
(Libya??), but where are legitimate US interests in all this? Trump ran on ending Middle East
wars and getting out of the region–the original reason the neocons jumped ship (in
addition to fears of a nascent Orange Hitler). Despite being president he has been unable to do
so. He has been strongly
opposed by the foreign policy establishment and the Pentagon -- a testament to the extent
to which the US security establishment is Israel-occupied territory.
Lurking in the background of the attitudes of Cohen and Edelman is the idea that Biden would
tame the forces on the left that have been so critical of Israel in recent years. With Biden
they get it all: Strongly pro-Israel even to the point of initiating a war with Iran, taming
the anti-Israel voices on the left (Kamala Harris with her Jewish husband s not among them),
and perhaps a Senate led by Israel operative Chuck Schumer. Meanwhile the Republican Party
would default to the Chamber of Commerce and the remaining neocons, and the hope of a
nationally competitive GOP, much less a truly populist GOP, would die. Bill Kristol loves the
prospect of a long-term Democrat domination.
And of course, all of these bellicose proposals are cloaked in a veneer of "Jewish values"
-- not so ironic if one assumes, as is certainly the case, that promoting war for specifically
Jewish interests is indeed a Jewish value.
Cohen spoke about Jewish values. He and his family belong to an orthodox synagogue and
have raised four children with a religious education. "I've tried to live my life by Jewish
values. One thing that's very important for Jewish Republicans. Obviously the issue of Israel
is important, it's the only Jewish state, it's important to look after it and for it to
thrive, but what is our approach to politics?" Jews don't believe that you Render unto God
the things that are God and render unto Caesar the thing that are Caesar's and therefore not
take issue with a politician's character "so long as they do what we want them to do." He
said, "That's not the Jewish way." In the Book of Samuel, the king engages "in despicable
behavior," and the prophet storms into his bedroom. "We believe that character matters." And
this election is about character.
Okay, Trump is not a saint. But given that Biden is up to his eyeballs in scandal doesn't
bother Cohen at all -- despite overwhelming documentation. So we are not supposed to care that
the Biden family raked in millions by using Biden's influence to alter US foreign policy or
that China could easily blackmail him into doing their bidding on trade and military issues. So
in the end, it's really about what Cohen, Edelman, Kristol, et al. think is good for Israel
(Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot jumped the GOP ship even before Trump was elected). Again, count
me unsurprised.
And of course, the other thing is that neocons have always been on the left
within the Republican Party. One might say they have attempted to not only make Israel a
bi-partisan issue (their first priority) but also promoting the liberal/left social agenda,
such as replacement-level non-White immigration, as a bipartisan issue -- both values strongly
promoted by the mainstream Jewish community. They jumped ship mainly because Trump was
promising to undo the liberal/left social agenda as well as disengage from foreign wars and US
occupation of the Middle East. During the 2016 campaign, some of the strongest denunciations of
Trump came from neocons ("
Jewish Fear and Loathing of Donald Trump: Neocon Angst about a Fascist America" ).
If you haven't seen it, Carlson's interview with Bobulinski is damning, and the documents he
refers to have been thoroughly authenticated.
Trump has been dealing with jews all of his life and knows what they are like. This is a
double-edged sword for jews as he is wise to their dishonest criminality and double-dealing
and is able to work around their machinations and dishonesty.
This s why (some) jews hate him. If he wanted to, he could expose them for what they truly
are
To Trump's credit, he has his own security detail interspersed within his Secret Service
protection team making possible harm or actions against him difficult if not impossible. A
good thing
I truly believe that Jews are the strongest assets Satan has. They are constantly forcing
us super-stupid Gentiles into wars for Israel. We have Gentile-American soldiers (Jews don't
serve) facing off against my white Christian brothers, mainly to be a counter-balance to
Iranian forces in the country who are battling U.S.-backed terrorists. Jews hate Russians
because they are white Christians and they actually hate us white-Christians in America, too.
(For now, we are simply useful idiots for them.) It is time that we Gentiles wake up and kick
every single last Jew out of this country before the Jews get us all killed!
DJT has done a good job of separating the J wheat from the chaff so to speak.
Unfortunately, it's the chaff that seems to have all the power money and influence. For
now.
Who paid for all this peace in the Middle East?
American tax money was used to
De-stabilize Iraq
De-stabilize Libya
De-stabilize Syria
Only Iran is left as a major power in the Middle East.
Let's get the draft going to get our brave boys and girls(and LGBTQ) fighting to maintain
peace in the Middle East.
We ALL need to give until we can give no more.
Maybe draft exemptions for the Ivy League, someone has to tell us what to do.
Jewish promoted Critical Race Theory believes and teaches that systemic racism is the main
reason why blacks commit criminal acts. Therefore the response to the disparity between White
and Black crime is to alter the standards, i.e., change White expections of the Black
community. Because to say to Black Americans that they must alter their behavior to meet the
current standards is racist.
Samuel Krasner, the Jewish DA in Philadelphia, is aboard with this. He decriminalised
shoplifting in his jurisdiction. And we now have shoplifters walking out of stores with
armfuls of stolen goods whilst smiling in the cameras and saying, 'I can't be
prosecuted.'
Then there is this unbelievable piece of BS legislation from Virginia: "Virginia
legislature passes bill preventing cops from stopping cars with no headlights, brake lights,
etc."
When Virginia state legislator who sponsored the bill, Patrick Hope, was asked about this
by a reporter from The Daily Press he responded by saying he didn't know that police were no
longer allowed to stop vehicles for not having their lights illuminated.
Patrick Hope sponsored a bill without actually knowing what was in it! If you think at
this stage that Patrick Hope is a hopeless idiot he gets worse.
When the importance of working brake lights on vehicles was mentioned to Hope he said:
"The brake lights -- I'm not concerned about that as a safety issue -- but I can certainly
see how headlights could be of concern ."
A Virginia state legislator is dumb enough to believe that brake lights have no importance
whatsoever to road safety in his state.
The modern United States? You couldn't f ** king make it up! By the way, who are the
majority people driving defective cars in Virginia? Blacks and other newly arrived
minorities, of course.
Would the local authorities in any part of Israel decriminalise shoplifting for a minority
demographic in their area? Not likely. How about Samuel Krasner, would he recommend that
crime be legalised for minorities in the state of Israel? No, he wouldn't. He's not stupid.
He would not do anything that would destroy his native country.
Would an utter idiot like Hope be allowed to introduce insane life endangering legislation
in Israel? No, his Jew financial backers would not allow that.
But, Trump or no Trump, all this is coming to your local area of America very soon.
It's amazing. It's astounding. A cursory look shows there are Jews behind every act of
destruction against White America and its founding culture.
The Jews are driving the de-educating of American youth, they've staffed 90% of the media
with lying, immoral and shameless journalists and installed unintelligent and easily
corruptible politicians in both US political parties.
As we see with Hope, the Jews have made possible state legislators who are so stupid that
they are probably suffering from mental health issues. What's very sad is that there's hardly
a peep from the great American public against them.
The Jews who first suggested making anti-semitism a crime in the West actually said to
their comtemperies at the time that it was just a "pipe dream." They never actually thought
in their wildest dreams that Western people and politicians would accept the lie that
anti-Jewishness was systemic in the West and needed laws to counteract it.
But, unbelievably for them, they easily got their anti-Semitism legislation enacted. And
then, enboldened, they drove ahead with Holocaust denial and all the other BS.
Now, as we see with the headlights, brake lights and the decriminalising of shoplifting
for Blacks, the Jews have become viciously emboldened. They've learned that European
provenanced Whites will accept any and all Bull S ** t that is thrown at them.
Shame on all Americans for sitting idly by whilst the tiny Jew demographic urines on all
that your forefathers built and fought for.
If your descents are Islamist slaves policed by Blacks in the latter half of this century
(all ruled from on-high by the Jews) they'll deserve it. They'll deserve it because their
fathers and grandfathers were idle and lazy cowards who sat on their butts while the great
inheritance which they were bequeathed was pulled out from under them.
BTW: Who had secured a vantage point in New York in September 2001 from which to watch the
planes fly into the buildings? And who then danced and cheered energetically as the planes
hit the buildings and killed 2,977 people?
Surely, you might think, it was Arabic Islamists, or Pakistanis, or some other race of
Muslims.
You'd be wrong if you thought this.
The correct answer is "five Israelis". Yes, it was five Jews who danced and sang as 2,977
Americans were murdered in cold blood.
@Lot el. Cursed with the loss of thousands of American lives resulting from such actions.
Cursed with the loss of tens of thousand of non-American lives from such actions. All this
for a shitty little country with which America doesn't even have a defence treaty.
Our Steadfast Ally ? The USS Liberty, Jonathan Pollard and the Israeli selling of American
defence technology to China immediately spring to mind. There is no defence treaty between
America and Israel. Israel is not America's ally. Rather it is a parasite on the American
body politic. Either Americans rip the parasite off their body, or it will eventually kill
America.
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want
to hear."
- George Orwell
The American people remain eager to be persuaded that a new president in the White House can
solve the problems that plague us.
Yet no matter who wins this presidential election, you can rest assured that the new boss
will be the same as the old boss, and we -- the permanent underclass in America -- will
continue to be forced to march in lockstep with the police state in all matters, public and
private.
Indeed, it really doesn't matter what you call them -- the Deep State, the 1%, the elite,
the controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the police state, the surveillance
state, the military industrial complex -- so long as you understand that no matter which party
occupies the White House in 2021, the unelected bureaucracy that actually calls the shots will
continue to do so.
In the interest of liberty and truth, here are a few hard truths about life in the American
police state that will persist no matter who wins the 2020 presidential election. Indeed, these
issues persisted -- and in many cases flourished -- under both Republican and Democratic
administrations in recent years.
Overcriminalization will continue. In the face of a government bureaucracy consumed with
churning out laws, statutes, codes and regulations that reinforce its powers and value
systems and those of the police state and its corporate allies, we will all continue to be
viewed as petty criminals, guilty of violating some minor law. Thanks to an overabundance
of 4,500-plus federal crimes and 400,000-plus rules and regulations, it is estimated that
the average
American actually commits three felonies a day without knowing it. In fact, according to
law professor John Baker, " There is no
one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime
." Consequently, we now find ourselves operating in a strange new world where small farmers
who dare to make unpasteurized goat cheese and share it with members of their community are
finding their farms raided, while home gardeners face jail time for daring to cultivate their
own varieties of orchids without having completed sufficient paperwork. This frightening
state of affairs -- where a person can actually be arrested and incarcerated for the most
innocent and inane activities, including feeding a whale and collecting rainwater on their
own property -- is due to what law scholars refer to as overcriminalization.
Jailing Americans for profit will continue. At one time, the American penal system
operated under the idea that dangerous criminals needed to be put under lock and key in order
to protect society. Today, as states attempt to save money by outsourcing prisons to private
corporations, imprisoning Americans in private prisons run by mega-corporations has turned
into a cash cow for big business. In exchange for corporations buying and managing public
prisons across the country at a supposed savings to the states, the states have to agree to
maintain a 90% occupancy rate in the privately run prisons for at least 20 years. Such a
scheme simply encourages incarceration for the sake of profits, while causing millions of
Americans, most of them minor, nonviolent criminals, to be handed over to corporations for
lengthy prison sentences which do nothing to protect society or prevent recidivism. Thus,
although the number of violent crimes in the country
is down substantially , the number of Americans being jailed for nonviolent
crimes such as driving with a suspended license is skyrocketing .
Endless wars that enrich the military industrial complex will continue. Having been
co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government
officials, America's expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more
than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour) -- and that's just what the government
spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the
1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe. Incredibly, although the U.S.
constitutes only 5% of the world's population, America boasts almost 50% of the world's total
military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations
combined. In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on
health, education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that
these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with
enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense. Consider that since 2001,
Americans have spent $10.5
million every hour for numerous foreign military occupations, including in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
Police shootings of unarmed Americans will continue. No matter what our party politics,
race, religion, or any other distinction used to divide us, we all suffer when violence
becomes the government's calling card. Remember, in a police state, you're either the one
with your hand on the trigger or you're staring down the barrel of a loaded gun. At least
400 to 500 innocent
people are killed by police officers every year. Indeed, Americans are now eight times
more likely to die in a police confrontation than they are to be killed by a terrorist.
Americans are 110 times more likely to die
of foodborne illness than in a terrorist attack. Police officers are more
likely to be struck by lightning than be made financially liable for their wrongdoing. As
a result, Americans are largely powerless in the face of militarized police.
SWAT team raids will continue. More than 80,000 SWAT team raids are carried out every year
on unsuspecting Americans for relatively routine police matters. Nationwide, SWAT teams have
been employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activity or mere
community nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an
orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession, to give a brief sampling. On an average
day in America,
over 100 Americans have their homes raide d by SWAT teams. There has been a
notable buildup in recent years of SWAT teams within non-security-related federal
agencies such as the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the
Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety
Commission, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Education Department.
The government's war on the American people will continue. "We the people" are no longer
shielded by the rule of law. While the First Amendment -- which gives us a voice -- is being
muzzled, the Fourth Amendment -- which protects us from being bullied, badgered, beaten,
broken and spied on by government agents -- is being disemboweled. Consequently, you no
longer have to be poor, black or guilty to be treated like a criminal in
America. All that is required is that you belong to the suspect class -- that is, the
citizenry -- of the American police state. As a de facto member of this so-called criminal
class, every U.S. citizen is now guilty until proven innocent. The oppression and injustice
-- be it in the form of shootings, surveillance, fines, asset forfeiture, prison terms,
roadside searches, and so on -- will come to all of us eventually unless we do something to
stop it now.
The rise of the surveillance state will continue. Government eyes are watching you. They
see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact,
when you wake up in the morning, what you're watching on television and reading on the
internet. Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in
order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when
and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line. Police have been outfitted with a litany of
surveillance gear, from license plate readers and cell phone tracking devices to biometric
data recorders. Technology now makes it possible for the police to scan passersby in order to
detect the contents of their pockets, purses, briefcases, etc. Full-body scanners, which
perform virtual strip-searches of Americans traveling by plane, have gone mobile, with roving
police vans that peer into vehicles and buildings alike -- including homes. Coupled with the
nation's growing network of real-time surveillance cameras and facial recognition software,
soon there really will be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
The erection of a suspect society will continue. Due in large part to rapid advances in
technology and a heightened surveillance culture, the burden of proof has been shifted so
that the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty has been usurped by a new norm
in which all citizens are suspects. This is exemplified by police practices of stopping and
frisking people who are merely walking down the street and where there is no evidence of
wrongdoing. Making matters worse are Terrorism Liaison Officers (firefighters, police
officers, and even corporate employees) who have been trained to spy on their fellow citizens
and report "suspicious activity," which includes taking pictures with no apparent aesthetic
value, making measurements and drawings, taking notes, conversing in code, espousing radical
beliefs and buying items in bulk. TLOs report back to "fusion centers," which are a driving
force behind the government's quest to collect, analyze, and disseminate information on
American citizens.
Government tyranny under the reign of an Imperial President will continue. The
Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers: to serve as Commander
in Chief of the military, grant pardons, make treaties (with the approval of Congress),
appoint ambassadors and federal judges (again with Congress' blessing), and veto legislation.
In recent years, however, American presidents have anointed themselves with the power to wage
war, unilaterally kill Americans, torture prisoners, strip citizens of their rights, arrest
and detain citizens indefinitely, carry out warrantless spying on Americans, and erect their
own secretive, shadow government. The powers amassed by each past president and inherited by
each successive president -- powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler
-- empower whomever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond
any real accountability. The grim reality we must come to terms with is the fact that the
government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned. More than terrorism, more than domestic
extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, the U.S. government has become a
greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called
dangers from which the government claims to protect us. This state of affairs has become the
status quo, no matter which party is in power.
The government's manipulation of national crises in order to expand its powers will
continue. "We the people" have been the subjected to an "emergency state" that justifies all
manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security.
Whatever the so-called threat to the nation -- whether it's civil unrest, school shootings,
alleged acts of terrorism, or the threat of a global pandemic in the case of COVID-19 -- the
government has a tendency to capitalize on the nation's heightened emotions, confusion and
fear as a means of extending the reach of the police state. Indeed, the government's answer
to every problem continues to be more government -- at taxpayer expense -- and less
individual liberty.
The bottom line is this: nothing taking place on Election Day will alleviate the suffering
of the American people. Unless we do something more than vote, the government as we have come
to know it -- corrupt, bloated and controlled by big-money corporations, lobbyists and special
interest groups -- will remain unchanged. And "we the people" -- overtaxed, overpoliced,
overburdened by big government, underrepresented by those who should speak for us and
blissfully ignorant of the prison walls closing in on us -- will continue to trudge along a
path of misery.
As I point out in my book
Battlefield America: The War on the American People , these problems will continue to
plague our nation unless and until Americans wake up to the fact that we're the only ones who
can change things for the better and then do something about it. If there is to be any hope of
restoring our freedoms and reclaiming control over our government, it will rest not with the
politicians but with the people themselves.
After all, Indeed, the Constitution opens with those three vital words, "We the people."
What the founders wanted us to understand is that we are the government.
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There is no government without us -- our sheer numbers, our muscle, our economy, our
physical presence in this land. There can also be no police state -- no tyranny -- no routine
violations of our rights without our complicity and collusion -- without our turning a blind
eye, shrugging our shoulders, allowing ourselves to be distracted and our civic awareness
diluted.
No matter which candidate wins this election, the citizenry and those who represent us need
to be held accountable to this powerful truth.
Neocon Eliot Cohen says a Trump reelection would amount to a moral collapse. He clearly
hasn't learned a thing. Eliot Cohen, professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins
University's School of Advanced International Studies, speaks during a discussion hosted by the
Hudson Institute titled "Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump" in Washington, USA on February 21,
2017. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
One of the more troubling features of America's current political culture is its inability
to cashier politicians, policymakers, military leaders, and other establishment figures who
have been proven not only wrong but wildly wrong. Those who led the nation into the unmitigated
disaster that was the Iraq War, for example, should have been quietly ushered off the nation's
public stage and, if not prosecuted, at least stigmatized for the horrors that they inflicted
upon the Iraqi people and our brave American troops. Members of Congress who supported the war
should have been defeated, public policy "intellectuals" who argued for it should have been
whisked off to private life, and generals who promised that victory was "around the corner"
should have been retired. There must be public accountability in the res publica .
But rather than being stigmatized, these establishment figures have been feted by the
establishment institutions that promoted their disastrous policies. Iraq hawk John McCain
assumed the chairmanship of the Senate Armed Services Committee years after it was apparent
that the war was a fiasco. Paul Wolfowitz, another Iraq War architect, became president of the
World Bank. Many American military leaders who urged us into Iraq, and then urged us to stay
there for many long years, were given book deals, lobbying contracts, and think tank
appointments. Even today, the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs is providing prime
real
estate to the intellectual godfather of the Iraq War, Eliot A. Cohen.
Cohen not only argued that the invasion of Iraq would be effortless, a mere mopping up after
the "cakewalk" that was the first Gulf War, he also went "all in" on the presence of WMDs and
the Baghdadian origins of the 9/11 attacks. He wrote boldly in the Wall Street Journal
in late 2001 that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would lead to a "far, far better life for the
Iraqi people." In short, he was not only wrong, he was wildly wrong.
Yet here he is again, in October of 2020, with the lead article in Foreign Affairs,
arguing with the same clichés he employed to lead us into Iraq, this time to attack
Trump. If reelected, Cohen says, Trump will destroy America's "moral purpose on the
international stage." With the Trump presidency, he declares, "the shining city on a hill has
grown dim." Trump has made it clear that he has "no intention of engaging in projects to expand
liberty." And of course, the unending string of clichés would not be complete without
multiple references to "isolationism" and a "world akin to the chaotic 1920s and 1930s," i.e.
the Nazis will have a huge renaissance if we reelect Trump.
This is nothing short of astonishing. That these hackneyed banalities, which were used to
launch a war that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents in the Middle East,
could be resurrected and published by one of the leading journals on American foreign policy
simply boggles the mind.
Yet if one is to critique Cohen, one finds oneself in the unenviable position of defending
Trump. With this Hobson's choice, one can only keep in mind Burke's admonition that
"circumstances give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and
discriminating effect." In other words, when critiquing Trump's foreign policy, one is obliged
to ask: compared to what?
Trump's foreign policy is one of profound strategic incoherence yet instinctual political
acumen. What many foreign policy realists and restrainers cannot seem to understand is that
Trump's policy is full of contradictions yet very much aligned with the views of his voters.
Populism is always full of contradictions.
For example, there is clear
evidence that, in 2016, Trump carried key Midwestern states because people in working-class
counties were sick and tired of seeing casualties return home from our endless wars in the
Middle East. Politically, Trump's desire to bring the troops home makes great sense. But to the
chagrin of libertarians, so does his desire to spend big money on the military. We probably
can't afford it, and the military-industrial complex is the primary beneficiary of profligate
military spending -- yet Trump's base loves fighter planes and aircraft carriers, so they are
enthusiastic about robust American power.
Keep going down the list. Are barbs directed at "Euroweenies" who freeload in NATO popular?
You bet they are. Is belligerence toward China, which hollowed out America's Midwestern
industrial base, popular? Check. Is Trump's unwise and unremitting hostility towards the
mullahs in Iran popular? Since those are the guys who took American hostages in 1979, yes, his
base chooses Trump over the mullahs. None of these foreign policy positions are driven by
strategic thought, but they are driven by an uncanny political sense.
If one believes that the U.S. needs to adopt a more restrained and coherent foreign policy,
then Trump's record is certainly a mixed bag. His political reticence to avoid new wars has
been the most attractive feature and his occasional bombastic and militaristic threats has been
the least attractive feature.
But in politics, one can only choose the options that are available, and what one gets with
Eliot Cohen's foreign policy is both politically unpopular and strategically disastrous. We
know, for example, what Cohen means when he says the United States should engage in "projects
to expand liberty." He means we need to act in Syria in 2020 as we did in Iraq in 2003: another
regime change quagmire with boots on the ground. America would become again, in Robespierre's
words, a nation of "armed missionaries."
The most ominous theme of the Cohen essay, however, reflects the sentiment now so common --
and so dangerous -- in the national security establishment: a Trump reelection would be
illegitimate. This would signal, Cohen says, that our American republic is "fundamentally
flawed" and that the United States had "undergone some kind of moral collapse."
Cohen's position reflects the establishment's absolute refusal to come to terms with their
2016 loss. There is no self-reflection, no sense that, with terrible errors such as the Iraq
War and the Wall Street bailouts, our elites may have themselves unleashed this Trumpian
populism. While the Framers of the American Constitution certainly feared populism, the one
thing they may have feared more is an intemperate, arrogant, and unaccountable elite.
William S. Smith is a senior research fellow and managing director of the Center for
the Study of Statesmanship at The Catholic University of America. His recent book Democracy
and Imperialism is from the University of Michigan Press.
On this edition of Empire Has No Clothes, Matt, Kelley, and Daniel speak to Stephen
Wertheim, deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible
Statecraft. He discusses his new book,
Tomorrow, the World , the rise of American global supremacy, and why that idea is now
breaking down. We also talk about the foreign policy presidential debate that wasn't and the
upcoming election.
Listen to the episode in the player below, or click the links beneath it to subscribe using
your favorite podcast app. If you like what you hear, please give us a rating or review on
iTunes or Stitcher, which will really help us climb the rankings, allowing more people to find
the show.
It makes me nauseous just thinking about who might be chosen for a Biden
administration.
There will be no hope for reform within the Democratic Party, ever, with a 2020 win.
A win will be the formal announcement of the death of "the left" as the ideology that has
traditionally represented the interests of the people. The credibility of "the left" has been
eroding with each regime change war the U.S. has been initiating and participating in, with
NATO, since the war on Yugoslavia, but particularly in the Middle East and Libya. There has
not been a reckoning. Moral transgressions and cowardice, greed and inertia have in fact been
rewarded, and institutionalised. Eichman's plea a badge of honour and the whistleblower blown
away. The neocons, those influential Jewish, X-Trotskyite political chameleons pushed those
wars, and soft sold them through their many corporate media connections to produce "left
wing" journalism which manipulated concern for cruel dictators, for persecuted ethnic
minorities, refugees, weapons of mass destruction (the latest toxic version is chemical
weapons) and the unavailability of certain kinds of human rights, in nations which were
experiencing wars of "bomb them back to the stone age" aggression and psychopathic proxy
terror arranged by these very same neocons.
"The left" signalled their virtue by believing the war propaganda, and have not sufficiently
grasped the gravity of the sham perpetrated on their minds by this array of war criminals.
The derangement by Donald syndrome has also proven to be a most emphatic signal of virtue
with "the left", a commandment of wokeness. It is also most apparent that the deplorables,
aka the rednecks, can never be included in a census of the left- oh that is just way beyond
the pale! Very hard to imagine a large group of people who are so denigrated, and not just
within the US. Even the bourgeois left has become elitist, and the elitist as in Marxist left
has paradoxically no time for people, let alone the common ones. Vk has left us in no
doubt.
Glen Greenwald is at his peak in his Tucker Carlson interview, talking of infiltration of
"the left" by the agencies. This is compelling journalism because these truths are dangerous.
If there is a deep state, then it is the Dems, they've got it covered and the Atlanticists
are their allies. It fits in with Giraldi's latest prognostications, and what would be a
counterrevolution and not a revolution should "the left" decide to make the push. By left he
means Dems and their corporate sponsored affiliates, partisan elements of the spy agencies
and big tech. (I think of Mark2 and his misspelt slogans straight from the Gene Sharpe
handbook and wonder if earnest Mark2 is a typical lefty cadre, and muse over his enthusiasm
for the gutless Jeremy Corbyn, whom I'm sure is a very nice chap personally, but look at the
Labour Party now. Mark2, have you heard of the two forms of fascism, fascism and anti
fascism?). Jimmy Dore continues to be heroic when faced with unpleasant truths. Keep being
mad Jimmy, and just don't stand for it anymore!
Some of us are grateful for these individuals (and thanks to b for his meta commentary)
because they are publically enacting a kind of meaculpa, and they have premonitions and we
are being warned. There is grace in that. There still are still some good people who can
speak publically.
I used to be left politically, but got disillusioned some time ago. Not knowing what
progressivism is leading to, and not trusting its practitioners, I find conservatism to be
the more reasonable and tolerant position for these times.
What Would A Democratic Presidency Really Change?worldblee , Oct 31 2020
17:02 utc |
1
Pepe Escobar is as pessimistic about a Harris (Biden) administration as I am. The incoming
foreign policy team would be the return of the
blob that waged seven wars during the Obama/Biden administration:
Taking a cue from [the Transition Integrity Project], let's game a Dem return to the White
House – with the prospect of a President Kamala taking over sooner rather than later.
That means, essentially, The Return of the Blob.
President Trump calls it "the swamp". Former Obama Deputy National Security Adviser Ben
Rhodes – a mediocre hack – at least coined the funkier "Blob", applied to the
incestuous Washington, DC foreign policy gang, think tanks, academia, newspapers (from the
Washington Post to the New York Times), and that unofficial Bible, Foreign Affairs
magazine.
A Dem presidency, right away, will need to confront the implications of two wars: Cold
War 2.0 against China, and the interminable, trillion-dollar GWOT (Global War on Terror),
renamed OCO (Overseas Contingency Operations) by the Obama-Biden administration.
The Democratic White House team Escobar describes (Clinton, Blinken, Rice, Flournoy) would
be an assembly of well known war mongers who all argue for hawkish policies. The main
'enemies', Russia and China, would be the same as under Trump. Syria, Venezuela, Iran and
others would stay on the U.S. target list. U.S. foreign policy would thereby hardly change
from Trump's version but would probably be handled with more deadly competence.
But Escobar sees two potential positive developments:
In contrast, two near-certain redeeming features would be the return of the US to the
JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal, which was Obama-Biden's only foreign policy achievement, and
re-starting nuclear disarmament negotiations with Russia. That would imply containment of
Russia, not a new all-out Cold War, even as Biden has recently stressed, on the record,
that Russia is the "biggest threat" to the US.
I believe that Harris (Biden) will disappoint on both of those issues. The
neoconservatives have already infested the Harris (Biden) camp. They will make sure that
JCPOA
does not come back :
Last night on an official Biden campaign webinar led by "Jewish Americans for Biden", and
moderated by Ann Lewis of Democratic Majority for Israel, two prominent neocon Republicans
endorsed Biden, primarily because of Trump's character posing a danger to democracy. But
both neocons emphasized that Biden would be more willing to use force in the Middle East
and reassured Jewish viewers that Biden will seek to depoliticize Israel support, won't
necessarily return to the Iran deal and will surround himself with advisers who support
Israel and believe in American military intervention.
Eric Edelman, a former diplomat and adviser to Dick Cheney, said Trump's peace plan has
fostered an open political divide in the U.S. over Israel, ...
Eliot Cohen, a Bush aide and academic, echoed the fear that Israel is being politicized.
...
...
Cohen and Edelman opposed Obama's Iran deal, and both predicted that Biden will be hawkish
on Iran.
...
"There will be voices" in the Biden administration that seek a return to the Iran deal, but
the clock has been running for four years, and we're in a different place, he said. And "it
will be hard [for Biden] not to use the leverage that the sanctions provide in part because
Iran is not abiding by a lot of the limits of the nuclear agreement They're about three,
maybe four months away from having enough fissile material to actually develop a nuclear
weapon."
For lifting the sanctions against Iran the Harris (Biden) administration will demand much
more than Iran's return to the limits of the JCPOA. Iran will reject all new demands, be they
about restricting its missile force or limiting its support for Syria. The conflict will
thereby continue to fester.
The other issue is arms control. While a Harris (Biden) administration may take up Putin's
offer to unconditionally
prolong the New-START agreement for a year it will certainly want more concessions from
Russia than that country is willing to give. Currently it is Russia that has the upper hand
in strategic weapons with already deployed hypersonic missiles and other new platforms. The
U.S. will want to fill the new 'missile gap' and the military-industrial complex stands ready
to profit from that. The New-START prolongation will eventually run out and I do not see the
U.S. agreeing to new terms while Russia has a technological superiority.
Domestic policies under a democratic president will likewise see no substantial
difference. As Krystal Ball remarked,
here summarized from a Rolling Stone podcast:
But even with a Biden win, Ball doesn't think it will mean much for policy.
"My prediction for the Biden era is that very little actually happens," says Ball.
"Democrats are very good at feigning impotence. We saw this in the SCOTUS hearings as well.
They're very good for coming up with reasons why, 'oh those mean Republicans, like we want
to do better healthcare and we want left wages, but oh gosh, Mitch McConnell, he's so
wiley, we can't get it done.'"
'Change' was an Obama marketing slogan to sell his Republican light policies. A real
change never came. The Harris (Biden) administration must be seen in similar light.
I therefore agree with the sentiment with which Escobar closes his piece :
In a nutshell, Biden-Harris would mean The Return of the Blob with a vengeance.
Biden-Harris would be Obama-Biden 3.0. Remember those seven wars. Remember the surges.
Remember the kill lists. Remember Libya. Remember Syria. Remember "soft coup" Brazil.
Remember Maidan. You have all been warned.
Posted by b at
16:45 UTC |
Comments (183) I have been trying to set the expectations for my deluded Democratic,
pro-tech industry, pro-security state friends and colleagues who think they are
forward-thinking progressives but actually just hate Trump as emblematic of non-college
educated blue collar types they prefer not to associate with. Biden himself said it, "Nothing
will change," and Obama deported many more people in his first term than Trump has to pick
but one issue. There will be no M4A, little change in foreign policy, no major stimulus for
workers, etc. But since the face in the White House will have changed, they will convince
themselves that America has changed and it was all thanks to them...
One major change I expect to see is that BLM protests will fade into the background if
Harris/Biden is elected. Without the need to pressure an administration the elites want to
get rid of, there won't be the funding and energy to sustain it. But America will continue on
the same downward trajectory and the same divisions will still exist with no remediation in
sight.
Really, so what? You have a choice between chaotic anarchic corruption, and organised
professional corruption. Is it not better to have the calm, predictable, version - at least
you know what you're getting. In any case I am not sure Biden would be able to go back to
launching new wars so easily. The US gives the impression of being over-stretched as it is.
It seems clear that Biden will win. This means that the possibility of a serious military
confrontation with Russia is more likely than it would be with a Trump win. In any Biden
cabinet Michelle Flournoy will have a major voice. She would have likely become Hillary's
Secretary of Defense. In August of 2016 Flournoy wrote a major foreign policy article
advocating a 'no fly' zone over Syria. That would have meant that the US military would have
been obliged to prevent the Russia airforce from operating in Syrian skies (even though, the
Syrian government had invited the Russians to be there). No one really knows if Flournoy
would have been given authority to carry out such insanity had Hillary won, but the
consequences of such insane policy are easy to imagine.
But without much doubt, a Biden administration will have Susan Rice and Michelle Flournoy
in very high policy positions. Given that Biden is rapidly descending into dementia and
Kamala Harris seems utterly clueless, US government foreign policy will very likely be led by
a Rice/Flournoy collaboration in the coming years. Of course, China has become a much bigger
player in the last four years. Maybe those fools around Biden will be distracted by China and
they avoid war with with Russia. In either case it looks like very dangerous times
ahead.
Trump was always for me about controlled demolition of the empire.
Putin will not tolerate another ramping up of hostilities in the MENA.
I believe, just as in 2016, open military confrontation with Russia hangs in the
balance.
It is believed here and elsewhere that Russia and China are working hand in hand and
lockstep to thwart the empire.
They may be trade allies but they are not bed fellows.
Russia will always do what is in its own interest and will be beyond reproach from China
come a last-minute attempt for it to talk down hostilities btw Ru and U.S.A.
I hope those peddling the narrative that all is theater and a mere globalist game to keep
the peons entertained are correct.
But I fear the stupidity and egoism of man far more than I do their love of money and life
of luxury.
The JCPOA's "snap back" provisions etc. prove that Obama never intended JCPOA as a long term
agreement in the first place. The issue was always how long it would suit, not how long it
would take for the US to. Nor is the US going to forego it's support for a colonial assault
on the Middle East, aka Israel, any more than England will give up Gibraltar.
That said, there really is a policy debate between attacking Russia first or attacking
China first or simultaneously attacking both. The thing is, the conflict will continue after
any election. Since the Democratic Party isn't a programmatic party but a franchise operation
of Outs, there will be zero unanimity within the Democratic Party and not even a clean sweep
of the national government will resolve the dispute, which will be waged with exactly the
same panic-mongering, paranoid cries of treason, barely subdued hysteria at the prospect of
the lower races overtaking the God-given rights of the US government to exercise imperium
(right to punish, particularly with death, originally) over humanity, and so on. The same
ignorant vicious halfwits who were convinced Clinton Foundation was worse than the Comintern
infiltrating innocent America made assholes of themselves. They'll just do it again over
Biden, but with different made up excuses.
Domestically, there will be real differences, albeit some will still consider them
entirely minor. There will be less emphasis on military officers masquerading as civilian
officials; more emphasis on actually having competent officials who are even confirmed by the
Senate; somewhat larger infrastructure investment; somewhat less deliberate destruction of
government capacity to deliver services; slightly greater emphasis on keeping money valuable
by limiting government spending, with smaller increases in military spending, slightly
greater taxes, and only limited support to state governments going bankrupt, bankrupt
unemployment and pension funds; a few restrictions on mass evictions; no separation of
families in ICE prisons; open appeals to racism will cease. There will not however be any
Medicare expansion, nor will there be a radically progressive federal income tax, not even a
new bankruptcy law, nor will there be even political reforms like direct popular election of
the president or even reform of the judiciary. There may be a minimum wage increase to $15
per hour.
One note: The idea that any president will honor any deal to step down or that a president
can be forced down is refuted by history thus far. All theories that Biden is scheduled to be
terminated are silly. Or worse, attempts to race bait Harris (note the ones who like to call
her by her first name.) The influence exercised by Obama in getting Biden the nomination
shows that if Biden is in any sense a puppet, he's Obama's puppet. Fixating on Harris instead
is foolish even as some sort of amateur conspiracy mongering. No matter what Obama thinks,
the inauguration will sever all puppet strings.
Can't say I'm convinced by all these threats of wars. They didn't do a No-Fly Zone in
Syria when they could, e.g. 2013. The reason it was not done is that it was too difficult to
do, and required too vast a military investment. Situation remains true today. You'll find
most of Biden's prospective wars fall in the same category.
The US self-declared "progressives" are horribly dumb people, no matter their degrees and
"intellectual" professions. Stupidity is the illness (weakness) of the societal immunity
system. The Blob of the parasitic class is the pestilence that thrives on the immune weakness
of the US society. Not happy with mine, then find a better metaphor.
I repeat myself from before, US presidents change, US policy (Mayhem Inc.) does not.
Nether on Russia, Syria, Iran, Venezuela ..., nor on China. If Trump loses, I will miss only
the potential duel at the OK Corral between Trump and the Blob/Swamp. If Trmp wins, I am
buying popcorn.
@Laguerre #7
I would argue the failure of a "no-fly" zone in Syria was more due to united UN (Russia and
China) opposition plus the Russia airbase in Tartus rather than any policy changes in the US.
It's everywhere. And matched by Democratic Party ineptitude, fake "resistance", and
generally lax attitude (spurred by a false sense of security due to polling numbers that
can't be relied upon).
That's why I'm predicting a Trump landslide - including winning the popular vote.
The Deep State wants a 'Glorious Leader' type that can lead the country against Russia and
China.
KB has it right the demodogs will have better PR but nothing will change. The only thing I
hope they do is fully throw the u.s. govt behind stopping the virus and even that will be
hard do to many stupid people.
Trumpster and the swamp all he did was change the cruel animals in it and biden will
change it back to the other cruel animals that were there before.
It is hard to tell what will change if the Democrats win because they have flip flopped on
policies so many times that you don't know what they really stand for.
Are they going to ban fracking or not?
Are they going to end the oil industry or not?
Are they going to pack the Supreme Court or not ?
Are they going to implement the Green New Deal or not ?
Are they going to encourage immigration or not ?
Are they going to tear down the Wall?
Are they going to defund the police or not?
Other than #OrangeManBad what do they actually stand for ?
Jonathan Pie lays it out quite nicely https://youtu.be/IdnHfYbr1cQ
The one issue that is critical is that it is clear than Biden will not make it full term.
His mental faculties are deteriorating rapidly. He might just make it over the goal post line
but just barely.
Therefore the real question is what will Kamala Harris do?
Russia has a lead in strategic weapons that the US will not be able to catch up with.
Hence the US emphasis on nuclear weapons to bridge the gap. Russia has successfully thwarted
the empire on several occasions. How will the empire struck back ? (So as not to lose
credibility with allies and vassals alike)
They are going to reduce government subsidies for fracking
And encourage the oil industry's ongoing retooling to other energies
They are going to expand the SCOTUS to 13 seats in keeping with the number of Circuit
Courts
They are going to implement environmental legislation and policies
They will hopefully try to adopt a comprehensive policy on immigration and naturalization
They will abandon The Wall project as pointless
They will review the role of the police in dealing with situations where a social worker or a
psychologist (with police escort) might better be able to handle the situation
Kamala Harris will keep an active and high profile as she is being groomed to run in
2024
I agree that trajectory in foreign policy will be the same. I think a Trump administration
would tend to entrench into the bureaucracy the xenophobic nationalists. This is in contrast
to the neoliberal nationalists that make up the Democrat side of the foreign policy clique.
In practice the latter ends up carrying water for the neocons, so the difference from the
global perspective, the perspective of those on whom the bombs fall, is academic.
Domestically, however, I don't think we can say there's no significant difference. At some
point far down the road, there will be a more meaningful internal political struggle in the
US. Talking about when the $$ printing power runs out, so several presidential cycles from
now at the very earliest, maybe many decades away.
The out-groups targeted by xenophobic nationalism will shift by then - either black or
hispanic people will necessarily be included into the Republican party, and the divide may be
more a matter of religion or nationality than race, but the overall idea will be the
same.
No matter the details, it would be better to go into that conflict without giving the
right-wingers a big head start. I think we should admit that Trump does accelerate the
process. Maybe readers outside the US take some pleasure in the chaos produced by this, but
for anyone actually planning to live within the US, who also objects to unrestrained
nationalism, there actually is a pretty high price to pay for peeling off the mask of phony
benevolence off of the de-facto imperialist foreign policy.
'b' half the truth isn't the truth, no doubt you'l get round to the other half. It's
conspicuous !
In these times focusing on what might happen if we get Biden, is biased.
What in your view might happen if we get trump ?
Given his track record.
Much more relevant I feel.
@Malchik #16
Well, kid, I will guarantee that 2/3rds of what you say will happen with a Biden win, won't
happen.
I am particularly struck by your assertion that "super predator" Biden and "Lock 'em up"
Harris will do anything to rein in police misbehavior. That is pure fantasy.
As for fracking: the subsidies were primarily by banksters in the form of loans and have long
since ended. Nobody believes fracking is going to be a profitable business for at least a
decade.
The only objection I have with supporting Trump's reelection from a non far-right viewpoint
is that you would essentially be supporting an anti-democratic process: Trump is certainly
going to lose the popular vote. Deserving or not, Biden does represent the absolute majority
of adult America. By supporting Trump, you're essentially speaking in the name of the
interests of a small redneck aristocracy (of circa 77,000 in size, according to the 2016
election results) in the Rust Belt and Western Pennsylvania. You are supporting white
supremacy those rednecks undoubtedly support - wanting you or not.
In my opinion, it's time for the non far-right of the USA to start thinking seriously
(specially if you're one of the twelve socialists in the country) in Third Party vote. Yes,
you won't pick up the fruits immediately, but at least you're build up a legacy for the
generations to come to try to change the landscape.
Now, of course, very little will change with Biden-Harris. But this has a good side, too:
it shows the American Empire has clearly reached an exhaustion point, where the POTUS is
impotent to the obstacle posed by China-Russia. Putin has already publicly stated he doesn't
care who's next POTUS; China has already stated what the USA does or decides won't mean shit.
Maybe the rising irrelevance of the POTUS is good in the greater scheme of things - or, at
least, it gives us new, very precious, information about the core of the Empire.
Is b really suggesting Trump is more peaceful than Biden?
The notion that Trump is fundamentally different than Biden or Hillary or Obama or Bush is
specious. They are all on Team Deep State, which serves the monied class.
And the pretense that the Deep State is divided or partisan is equally laughable.
Strange that so many smart people fall for the shell game behind the 'Illusion of
Democracy'. Is it so difficult to see the reshuffling of deck chairs and entertaining
diversions that pass for "US politics"?
Biden will bring fresh blood to the Presidency, just you watch.
But seriously, things have been changing very rapidly all of my life, and accelerating as
we go. I don't see that the political/managerial classes here are up to the job of managing
that change, have shown any aptitude for it or understanding of it in the past either. They
remain focussed on their depraved personal ambitions and demented interpersonal disputes. So
no change in the midst of lots of change is what I expect, time to keep an eye out and
consider ones options.
By supporting Trump, you're essentially speaking in the name of the interests of a small
redneck aristocracy (of circa 77,000 in size, according to the 2016 election results) in
the Rust Belt and Western Pennsylvania. You are supporting white supremacy those rednecks
undoubtedly support - wanting you or not.
Jesus but that is an ignorant comment. Michael Moore explained 4 years ago why Trump will win
the election (2016) https://youtu.be/vMm5HfxNXY4
div> @vk #21
You said:
The only objection I have with supporting Trump's reelection from a non far-right
viewpoint is that you would essentially be supporting an anti-democratic process: Trump is
certainly going to lose the popular vote.
The United States has a Constitution and was designed as a Republic.
"Democracy" as in majoritarian rule was explicitly designed against by the Founding
Fathers.
Thus your criticism is utterly irrelevant. Until the Electoral College system is changed by
Constitutional Amendment, or the United States of America is overthrown by a revolution, all
this talk about "majoritarian demos rule" is purely partisan nonsense.
Note also that the 48 states which are "first past the post" are all disenfranchising the
minority views. I 100% guarantee that a European style ranked vote system would see far more
minority votes be submitted than the present systems.
Deserving or not, Biden does represent the absolute majority of adult America. By
supporting Trump, you're essentially speaking in the name of the interests of a small redneck
aristocracy (of circa 77,000 in size, according to the 2016 election results) in the Rust
Belt and Western Pennsylvania. You are supporting white supremacy those rednecks undoubtedly
support - wanting you or not.
Wow, thanks for showing your "deplorables" views. Anyone against the "right"
and "proper" Democrat sellouts to pharma, tech and enviro must be rednecks. It is precisely
this view that galvanized the vote against HRC in 2016.
The only objection I have with supporting Trump's reelection from a non far-right viewpoint
is that you would essentially be supporting an anti-democratic process: Trump is certainly
going to lose the popular vote.
The United States has a Constitution and was designed as a Republic.
"Democracy" as in majoritarian rule was explicitly designed against by the Founding
Fathers.
Thus your criticism is utterly irrelevant. Until the Electoral College system is changed by
Constitutional Amendment, or the United States of America is overthrown by a revolution, all
this talk about "majoritarian demos rule" is purely partisan nonsense.
Note also that the 48 states which are "first past the post" are all disenfranchising the
minority views. I 100% guarantee that a European style ranked vote system would see far more
minority votes be submitted than the present systems.
Deserving or not, Biden does represent the absolute majority of adult America. By
supporting Trump, you're essentially speaking in the name of the interests of a small
redneck aristocracy (of circa 77,000 in size, according to the 2016 election results) in
the Rust Belt and Western Pennsylvania. You are supporting white supremacy those rednecks
undoubtedly support - wanting you or not.
Wow, thanks for showing your "deplorables" views. Anyone against the "right" and
"proper" Democrat sellouts to pharma, tech and enviro must be rednecks. It is precisely this
view that galvanized the vote against HRC in 2016.
The notion that Trump is fundamentally different than Biden or Hillary or Obama or Bush is
specious.
That's not actually true.
Biden has 47 years of track record to rely on.
HRC, ditto.
Bush is umpteenth generation Bush in government (100 years plus).
Obama was groomed through Harvard, community organization and Senate position as a servant of
the oligarchy.
Trump is a billionaire and 2nd generation wealthy, but he neither shares the views of the
oligarch classes - his historical behavior is clear proof of that - nor is he predictable as
the other 4 are.
If presented with a neocon view - all 4 of the above would 100% agree.
Trump? 85%.
That is a difference albeit absolutely not world changing.
Pure BS.
Giving health care to 20 million poor Americans ain't nothing to sneeze at. Adding pre
existing conditions save millions of lives. That's why the right despises Obama so much. How
dare he give money to those free loaders!
lets show what the republicans have done for poor Americans besides taking more needex
money from them and giving it to their rich buddies.
and No, Democrats cannot do anything if they don't control the Congress. They should have
done it 2 years ago but since all they were doing was scream RUSSIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! at
the top of their lungs,the people turned their backs on them.
Bullshit article.
The Democrats are not going to end fracking. It is doomed to collapse without their help. A
Wall Street Journal study revealed a remarkable fact that few Americans know; From 2000-2017
fracking companies spent $280 billion more to extract fracked oil and gas than they received
in revenue. Fracking is nothing more than a massive Ponzi scheme predicated on the constant
issuing of debt and stock. Fracking wells deplete quickly. There is a constant need for more
expensive drilling. The remaining areas that will be fracked have less productive wells. Much
of the debt fracking companies have issued is back loaded while the well's production is
front loaded. There simply isn't going to be enough revenue generated to meet debt
obligations. What made the scheme possible was the artificially low interest rates created by
the Federal Reserve. There was a demand for yield that drove investment into debt of dubious
quality. A crash is inevitable.
Biden will bring fresh blood to the Presidency, just you watch.
I am curious why you think so.
Biden is nothing, if not a creature of habit (of obedience to his corporate masters).
Biden likely NSC: Tony Blinken. Deputy Secretary of State and Deputy NSC under Obama.
Susan "Bomber" Rice?
John Kerry?
Sally Yates? The one who signed the FISA warrants based on the Steele Dossier (based on 2
drunkard Russians in Malta mad at being fired)
Michael Bloomberg?
Jamie Dimon?
The only "fresh blood" in this group is the teenage blood they inject to try and remain
young.
Elizabeth Warren, were Biden to appoint her as Treasury Secretary, *would* constitute fresh
blood.
The likelihood of the Senator from MBNA appointing her to that position is zero.
I would love to be wrong in that instance, but it ain't gonna happen.
What is trumps legacy so far ?
Let's call that -- - 'The Crimes Of Donald Trump'
Well he has legitimised cold blooded murder.
Ditto racism.
Run roughshod over national laws and conventions. -- Invading an embassy. Assange, koshogie
murder, white helmit chlorine attack false flag. Funding and arming by US of Isis.
Corporate mansloughter by virus.
Interference in numerous country's internal politics.
Allowing Israel to interfer take over US politics.
The above are a few that comes to mind.
Have we done away with law and order ?
Feel free to add to my 'Crimes of Donald Trump' list.
In a word normalisation.
I hope you are right that the US will avoid war in Syria because they would lose. I was,
on the other hand, very impressed that Flournoy was advocating that no fly zone in August of
2016. It was on the basis of her article at that time I fled the US Democratic Party. I knew
it was bad before, but it suddenly became clear how Hillary would lead us int WWIII.
We've talked at moa about how policy doesn't change much between Democrat and Republican
Administrations. And we've talked about the Illusion of Democracy.
That each President has a different personality as well as different priorities and
challenges during their time in office doesn't indicate any fundamental difference in how we
are governed.
And Hillary Clinton wants to be Secretary of Defense in a Biden administration. Not only
would the world be in trouble I could see her using the DOD internal hit teams to go after
her domestic enemies. They will make 8 years of Bush junior look like a Disneyland vacation.
It will be similar to the many unsolved murders of Weimar Germany.
That was sarcasm, I knew it was going to cause trouble, sarcasm never works on the web
unless you add a /sarc tag or something, I guess I feel a bit perverse today.
But to be serious, any attempt to predict what comes next here must rely on the idea that
the future will be like the past, we extrapolate in other words, from various trends that we
pick out. We can expect Biden to remain who he has been in the past, politicfally he's a
hack, what we know of Harris does not suggest any principles to speak of either, so I feel
more like I want to pay attention to what's coming than trying to predict what they is going
to do or not do. That likely depends on "contingencies" just as in the past.
#23 - "I don't see that the political/managerial classes here are up to the job of managing
that change, have shown any aptitude for it or understanding of it in the past either."
This is a highly relevant observation. For some time the character and intellectual scope
of the political/managerial sectors in the West have been noticeably mediocre, and will
likely continue as such for the foreseeable future. The necessary reforms of capitalism were
vetoed decades ago, ensuring that productive energies would gradually dissipate. For the last
decade all the West has had to offer the rest of humanity is neoliberal austerity, colour
revolutions, and armament contracts. This is a journey towards an eventual hollowed-out
self-imposed isolation, a process the political/managerial sectors are actively encouraging
and supporting without realizing it at all.
Interesting to see how the kayfabe vocabulary of Dim propaganda infects everyone's thought
and speech. Including b's:
"'Change' was an Obama marketing slogan to sell his Republican light policies."
Republican my eye. Democrat policies, period. A party founded, maintained and run to
implement the ruling class empire and war agenda, just like the Repucrats.
As if Obama was some kind of exception. Ditch this language.
usa is the major unknown;
China and Russia don't need to physically war - they are winning at PR around the globe.
Even tiny Cuba has greatly better creds!
usa needs to be a people who truly and consistently respect their allies.
Which comes back to usa being the major unknown.
'Cept for warmongering.
"All of us who spent careers in the military were raised on the notion that you lead by
example, and President Trump has been the antithesis of that in dealing with this
pandemic," said Charles "Steve" Abbot, former commander of the U.S. Sixth Fleet and deputy
Homeland Security Adviser. "Instead of taking steps that I would call 'Crisis Management
101,' President Trump shirked his duty to the nation by failing to provide the central
leadership necessary to get our arms around the problem, and he continues to mislead the
entire nation about this terrible threat. The result of that failure of leadership was that
his administration committed an unrelenting string of missteps, and the American public has
lost trust in what the president tells them."
The sixth Fleet is Europe, so "this terrible threat" must be Russia, which is the natural
enemy of the DNC/AtlanticCouncil/NATO unlike Trump the 'Putin-lover.'
And more on anti-Russia, from the article:
President Trump's former national security adviser John Bolton said earlier this year that
Trump had repeatedly raised the issue of withdrawing the United States from NATO, and
warned of "a very real risk" that Trump would actually follow through in a second term.
Nicholas Burns, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and the number three official at the
State Department, put it this way: "Every modern president since Harry Truman has viewed
our commitment to democratic allies around the world as sacrosanct, because for half a
century those alliances have been a key source of American power." He noted that a
dissolution of NATO is at the top of Russian President Vladimir Putin's wish list. "Under
President Trump we have walked away from that global leadership, and, as a result, trust in
the United States has plummeted even among our closest friends. That's done enormous
damage."
This is a journey towards an eventual hollowed-out self-imposed isolation, a process the
political/managerial sectors are actively encouraging and supporting without realizing it at
all.
Posted by: jayc | Oct 31 2020 19:18 utc | 37
I've been sort of fascinated by that for some time, back when I was young we were still
smart enough to know we had to compete with the USSR, and that we therefore had to develop
our human capital. And we did pretty well for a couple decades, but then after VietNam they
stopped doing that and choose the present "system" instead. Thus abandoning their long-term
ability to compete, the source of their power in the first place. Banana republics do not
compete well. Decadent.
But you have to give credit to the Russians and the Chinese too, their achievements are
impressive by any standard. Our enemies, the ones who have survived, have all proved their
mettle.
Can be, can be, no expectations in Biden / Harris. Nevertheless, Tronald is definitely not
the lesser evil. His foreign policy is also heading for a clash with China, and things are
not going well with Russia either. The warmongering anti-Iran axis has his support, the war
in Yemen continues, he won't leave Syria alone, his extremely Israel-friendly attitude
increases the danger of war. Everything that is suspected of being left-wing in South America
is strangled.
In addition, he has an encouraging effect on all the fascists of the world, his disastrous
ecological policy, his negative influence on the treatment of the Corona crisis, his general
dislike of multilateral organizations and treaties on which the weaker states of the world
are compulsorily dependent. Overall, he exerts an extremely negative influence on the entire
globe. He should be disposed of.
He will lose the elections, but what happens then is open.
The claim that support for minority rule isn't purely partisan BS is yet another lie. The
moral principle in countermajoritarianism like the Founders' is that democracy cannot be
allowed to threaten property. Except of course property before democracy, before liberty,
before humanity is a vile and disgusting tenet that shames everyone so lost to common
decency. The defense that a piece of parchment, a law, makes things moral and righteous and
that even opposition is somehow wrong is an offense against common sense. By that standard,
the Thirteen, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were the end of freedom in America!
It's one thing to have a mind deranged by rabid hate of your perceived social superiors,
but to openly uphold vulgarity is merely snobbery inverted. It is a mean and small minded
vice, always, and never a virtue. The Access: Hollywood tape was proof of vulgarity but to
defend it as not being proof of a crime but as a positive good is vicious. Vicious is not a
synonym for "bad ass." Or if it news, then "bad ass" is a horrible insult.
And, speaking of deranged minds, Wilson was felled by a stroke and Reagan was felled by
Alzheimer's, yet they did not fall from power. Quite aside from the question of how anyone
could decide who is battier, Trump or Biden, Biden will never be replaced by Harris for
incapacity short of a coma.
A very cogent analysis by b. But I believe the return of the Blob may not be as ominous as
feared.
The dangerous component of the Blob's collective fantasy is the confrontation against
China and Russia. As late as 4, 5 years ago the prevailing sentiment among Americans, the
masses and the elites alike, was one in which The Empire's might was still considered
unquestionably dominant and unchallenged. There was penchant for dressing down both China and
Russia, and the clumsy maneuvers of the Blob's operators (Obama/Clinton/Bolton/Rice et al)
were wholeheartedly supported even if contemptuously regarded for their clumsiness. That
sentiment has evaporated, especially after Chinese and Russian military parades as well as
American's numerous own infrastructure project failures along with abject performances of
Boeing jets and Zumwalt class destroyers. The COVID19 pandemic adds salt to injury.
There is an issue with self confidence now, up and down the hierarchy within the American
society, perhaps with the lone exception of Trump's rednecks.
So, the Blob may return with a vengeance but their political capital may be rather meager.
They will be all mouth and little substance, as would Trump's prospective second term.
I do not always agree with the opinion of the Saker, but in this matter I tend to support him
and can only quote from one of his recent articles :
And, in truth, the biggest difference between Obama and Trump, is that Trump did not start
any real wars. Yes, he did threaten a lot of countries with military attacks (itself a
crime under international law), but he never actually gave the go ahead to meaningfully
attack (he only tried some highly symbolic and totally ineffective strikes in Syria). I
repeat – the man was one of the very few US Presidents who did not commit the crime
of aggression, the highest possible crime under international law, above crimes against
humanity or even genocide, because the crime of aggression "contains within itself the
accumulated evil", to use the words of the chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg and Associate
Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Robert H. Jackson. I submit that just
for this reason alone any decent person should choose him over Biden (who himself is
just a front for "President" Harris and a puppet of the Clinton gang). Either that, or
don't vote at all if your conscience does not allow you to vote for Trump. But voting
Biden is unthinkable for any honest person , at least in my humble opinion.
I am surprised by people who are of the opinion that half-dead Biden, suffering from
obvious dementia, is better. If only not Trump.
In 2016, Hilary, in fact, openly stated that she was going to use the so-called 'nuclear
blackmail' against the Russian Federation. And there was no guarantee that this crazy old
witch, having become president, would not have pressed the very button that launched nuclear
missiles at Russia. Four years ago, the choice was between an insane sadistic misanthropist
who could actually start a nuclear war, and a "dark horse" businessman with the illusory
prospect of some improvement in relations between the two strongest nuclear powers. I do not
want to drag in religion and the intervention of higher powers here, but it may not be at all
accidental that Trump snatched victory from the witch. Maybe we avoided a nuclear war.
Yes, now both options are bad. But of the two evils, it is better to choose the lesser,
which, of course, Trump is.
two near-certain redeeming features would be the return of the US to the JCPOA, or Iran
nuclear deal, which was Obama-Biden's only foreign policy achievement, and re-starting
nuclear disarmament negotiations with Russia. That would imply containment of Russia,
not a new all-out Cold War , even as Biden has recently stressed, on the record, that
Russia is the "biggest threat" to the US.
What? Funny. I thought it was Obama (read Democrats) who started this new Cold War. Just
to remind - It was Obama who made the decision to deploy missiles in Poland and Romania,
which are a direct threat to Russia. It is Obama & Co who are responsible for the
Ukrainian coup, which, in fact, became a trigger for the total deterioration of relations
between Russia and the West. It was Obama who began the unprecedented expropriation of
Russian diplomatic property in the U.S. and the expulsion of russian diplomats. It was under
Obama that "the doping scandal" was organized against Russia. And so on and so on...
Trump just continued what Obama had started. It is strange that Pepe Escobar does not
understand this.
If Iran and/or Venezuela get their oil back on the market, that will cause an oil price crash
that would "end fracking." It can't survive oil much under $50/barrel over a long term.
An oil price crash would also effect the larger energy market, making solar and wind less
competitive, even though their direct competition is really coal rather than oil.
Huge and powerful constituencies don't care about Iran or Venezuela, but care very much
about oil prices staying high. They make common cause now, and will under Biden too.
Well, having given deep consideration to the question and the current advanced state of
malady in the USA - I will leave it to Vic as he has summarised the position with minimum
fuss - here.
Enjoy this sharp witted, all encompassing 4 minute rant from inside the asylum. I would
shout the bar for all with this one.
Biden is an old man. He is a tired man, if not now, then in six months. He has already told
wealthy donors that nothing will change. He has no record of leadership. He has no record of
achievement, unless you count floating to the top. He will be the establishment's model
'status quo, do-nothing Democrat.
Biden will preside as a figurehead legitimizing the shenanigans of the blob, Wall Street,
and the US Chamber of Commerce, and Big Oil. Heck, I doubt that he will even override many of
Trump's executive orders, except for the token bone thrown to his delusional supporters.
Harris will be as much a figurehead as Biden. She is utterly unprepared. While she is
likable enough, she lacks gravitas and "credibility," which, she will be convinced, can be
established only by bombing a few wogs back to the Stone Age.
Both will serve as placeholders until Trump 2.0 arrives in 2024. Elites will sufficiently
sabotage the economy until then to assure that Trump 2.0 with neocon values is elected in
2024.
the usa is an approaching train wreck and no amount of persuading one side or the other is
going to change any of this... the world is moving on and rightfully so... no one wants to
get down into this... the swamp and fake news is permanent at this point...until the whole
system implodes - this is what we have in store.. vote for trump or biden - it matters not...
one is a slower motion move then the other - but the end result is the same... there is no
way out... sorry... on the other hand it is beautiful and sunny here where i live... life
goes on outside this political circus called the usa presidential election..
Posted by: c1ue | Oct 31 2020 18:50 utc | 26
I do not agree with you on 99.8% of wordly affairs BUT this comment you wrote is pure
gold!!
Even on the other side of the Atlantic ocean @ the western edge of Europe us reading types
know the difference.
And it annoys me just as much as it seems to annoy you how few people know that the US of
terror is a republic and NOT a democracy😂🥴
By the way, people who are truly interested in seeing the Democratic Party removed as an
obstacle to a true people's party (no one else here wants a workers' party) the very best way
to split the national party would be a clean sweep of House, Senate and Presidency followed
by enough treasonous shenanigans by Trump to arouse mass resistance. (Genuinely treasonous as
in subverting the republic by force, fraud and violence, not in the half witted definition of
dealings with foreigners so popular around here.) Biden et al. would split the Democrats
rather than enact a popular program---which would be left because the when the masses begin
to move they always march left.
Also by the way, Bloomberg is continuing his bid for a hostile takeover of the Democratic
Party, aping the media version of Trump's hostile takeover of the Republic (NOT A DEMOCRACY!)
Party.
"Change' was an Obama marketing slogan to sell his Republican light policies. A real change
never came."
I was calling Obama "Bush Lite" during his first campaign. Anyone who read his foreign
policy platform would have to agree. And the *only* reason he negotiated the JCPOA was
because he needed at least one foreign policy win for his eight years - and he knew it would
be torn up by whoever came after him, either Clinton or Trump. But he needed it for his own
narcissistic view of his "legacy".
People forget that Obama wrote the leaders of Brazil and Turkey in 2010 prior to their
negotiation with Iran for a deal, listing the points of a deal he would accept. Clinton
pooh-poohed the idea that those leaders could get a deal. After a marathon negotiation
session, they got it. The US then dismissed the deal 24 hours later, prompting Brazil's
leader to release the Obama letter to establish that Obama was a liar.
"Change You Can Believe In" - "Make America Great" - only morons believe in campaign
slogans - or the people who utter them.
"The other issue is arms control. While a Harris (Biden) administration may take up Putin's
offer to unconditionally prolong the New-START agreement for a year it will certainly want
more concessions from Russia than that country is willing to give."
Russia has made it abundantly and repetitively clear that they are not doing INCREMENTAL
DEFEAT any more - there are no concessions to make - they no longer do supine acceptance of
UKUSAi rights to dominate, subvert or belligerently mass arms at their advancing borders.
Why would any country concede to the incessant belligerence of the west? They must have
lead in their drinking water to be that dumb!
The concession must come from the aggressor, the colour revolution fomenter, the incessant
smearer and hate propagandist - the west.
A Harris/Biden Presidency lacks those attributes (perhaps lacks any attributes of
goodwill) and a Trump Presidency is no different.
The narcissistic personality disorders run the USA - the asylum inmates are in charge, not
the elected leaders. And the elected leaders are morons or wholly captive klutzes.
Posted by: Laguerre | Oct 31 2020 17:36 utc | 7 They didn't do a No-Fly Zone in Syria when
they could, e.g. 2013. The reason it was not done is that it was too difficult to do
Obama tried *six times* to start a war with Syria. First he submitted *three* UNSC
Resolutions with Chapter 7 language in them. Russia and China - burned by the US over Libya -
vetoed those. Then Obama was within hours of launching an attack on Syria in August, 2013. He
only stopped when he got push-back from Congress and then Putin outmaneuvered him by getting
Assad to give up his chemical weapons. Then in fall, 2015, Obama was talking no-fly zone yet
again. Putin again outmaneuvered him by committing Russian forces to Syria. Then sometime in
2016 - I forget the exact month - there was a news article saying Obama was having a meeting
on that Friday to discuss no-fly zone yet *again*. That Tuesday or Wednesday, the Russia
Ministry of Defense issued a statement that anyone attacking Syrian military assets would be
shot down by Russia. On Friday, Obama pulled back and said there wouldn't be a no-fly
zone.
So it was Russia, primarily, that was the reason Obama didn't not succeed *six times*
trying to start a war with Syria.
"Biden will bring fresh blood to the Presidency, just you watch."
YES. thank you for the clarifying statement, as that is exactly what I expect too. Harris
/Biden blood spattered globe again. Or a Trump spattered equivalent. No socialism for the
USA.
We went from snarling Cheney Wars to shiny happy Obama wars to snarling Trump wars now back
to shiny happy Biden wars to... Forever War is obviously bi-partisan.
But perhaps with Great Depression 2.0 coming this Dark Winter in order to stave off civil
war and/or revolution they'll throw resources to much needed infrastructure projects,
diminish to a slight degree the supremacy of the for-profit healthcare industry through a
laughable but better than nothing 'public option' and make some baby steps toward avoiding
climate catastrophic.
The change is marginal. And probably meaningless. Hope is just another word for nothing
left to lose.
Those 77,000 - purely because of location - overcame 3 million+ votes. That's the
equivalent of giving those 77 thousands the right to vote 40 times each.
Are you in favor of censitary vote?
--//--
@ Posted by: c1ue | Oct 31 2020 18:50 utc | 26
Yes, but at the end of the day, Hilary Clinton got 3.6 million votes more than Donald
Trump.
You're telling everybody you're in favor of censitary vote in opposition to one person,
one vote, just because you don't want an ideological enemy of yours to win. This is still
liberal - but you would have to dig to the early liberal thinkers (Locke, Tocqueville etc.)
to find such reactionary and elitist opinion.
Even by liberal standards today censitary vote is already considered outdated/reactionary.
Concretely, you're defending the interests of a blue collar elite of the north-midwest, who
number on the dozens of thousands, in detriment to more than half the voting population. It
is what it is: you can't fight against mathematics.
--//--
@ Posted by: Down South | Oct 31 2020 18:47 utc | 25
So what? Fuck Michael Moore. If Michael Moore told you to jump off a cliff, would you do
it? He's not the guardian of the absolute truth, he's just a random guy with an opinion.
Michael Moore can defend a mythical blue collar America how much he wants to - it doesn't
change the fact this America doesn't exist anymore. America is, nowadays, the land of the
petit-bourgeois, the land of the small-medium business-owners (a.k.a. zombie business-owners)
, of the New York financial assets owning middle class "coastal elites", of the influencers,
of Kim and Chloe Kardashian, of Starbucks, Amazon and Apple, of the billionaire tied to Wall
Street. That's the true America, want it.
America will never be blue collar again. The insistence of turning America blue collar
again will destroy the American Empire. They will be the Gorbachevs of the USA.
Obama tried *six times* to start a war with Syria. First he submitted *three* UNSC
Resolutions with Chapter 7 language in them. Russia and China - burned by the US over Libya
- vetoed those. Then Obama was within hours of launching an attack on Syria in August,
2013. He only stopped when he got push-back from Congress and then Putin outmaneuvered him
by getting Assad to give up his chemical weapons. Then in fall, 2015, Obama was talking
no-fly zone yet again. Putin again outmaneuvered him by committing Russian forces to Syria.
Then sometime in 2016 - I forget the exact month - there was a news article saying Obama
was having a meeting on that Friday to discuss no-fly zone yet *again*. That Tuesday or
Wednesday, the Russia Ministry of Defense issued a statement that anyone attacking Syrian
military assets would be shot down by Russia. On Friday, Obama pulled back and said there
wouldn't be a no-fly zone.
So it was Russia, primarily, that was the reason Obama didn't not succeed *six times*
trying to start a war with Syria.
Thank you, it seems that your succinct statement should be included as an auto response
macro to every laguerre post. They never stop their blathering those AI CPU's. My take is
that they are a retro definition of the term interrupt .
I remember you as being a reasonably sane contributor but atm you have a serious case of
TDS. Are you seriously trying to tell us that the last 4 years of US media foaming at the
mouth about Trump (Russia-gate, Trump supporters being 'white supremacists' and egging on a
race war) were all a plot to get him re-elected? I mean seriously? WTF? What the hell would
they do if they wanted him removed?
Now I know I have been very very harsh on trump and his supporters of late. Please forgive me
! It's what we call 'tough love' I do have a heart, dispite all of America's crimes against
the rest of the world. I did hope that the US at the last moment would come to it's senses
and turn it's back on trump. Alas ! I fear not. Really sad, I'm sorry.
But for the rest of the world including myself, we can only watch with fascination and relief
as America destroys itself from within. My heart goes out to the inocent.
I fear trump supporters are in for a -- --
Pyrrhic victory (spelt correctly) I recommend googling the word.
Adolph Hitler rose to power with similar glory and power unbridled. Just as trump now !!
Then what ?
Dresden!!
Think on.
Why is it so hard to believe? The media needs a heel and they actually prefer Trump to
remain in office. Maybe on the ground level you have a lot of regular old liberals, but the
upper echelons of the media (and holding companies) are all about keeping the ratings bonanza
going. Another Trump term but with Democrat control of Congress would be like manna from
heaven to them. Matt Taibbi is one writer who has chronicled the phenomenon since before
Trump ever got elected. Here's a more recent piece. Let me know if it's paywalled and I can
copy/paste. CNN
chief has an ethical problem.
On JCPOA, The Nation had a quote from one of Biden's foreign policy advisers to a group of
Jewish campaing donors saying all sanctions on Iran will remain intact unless they return to
full compliance. I agree that it will not be as simple as that given political reality, but
Biden was closely involved in its negotiation and likely has some ownership of it.
I expect there to be a false flag attack by "Iran" to throw sand in the gears if
re-implementation looks likely, or perhaps an Israeli attack on Lebanon. Best plausible
outcome is Iran keeps its current level of cooperation, and a Biden admin looks the other way
on sanctions violationsw.
Are you seriously trying to tell us that the last 4 years of US media foaming at the mouth
about Trump (Russia-gate, Trump supporters being 'white supremacists' and egging on a race
war) were all a plot to get him re-elected? I mean seriously? What the hell would they do if
they wanted him removed?
_____________________________________________
Of course it was all phony and designed to not ring true, which benefits Trump by giving him
credibility with the voters.
The whole idea behind trump is the same as with Reagan he is portrayed as the outsider doing
battle against the corrupt and powerful Washington swamp. Trump is Reagan on steroids. But it
is all phony both Reagan and Trump are one of the powerful elites and their opposition by the
left wing media is designed to give them credibility with voters.
Remember that half of the corporate controlled media loves Trump and sings his praises
daily. It is only half the corporate media that is attacking Trump the other half is showing
its viewers blacks that strongly support Trump and solid evidence that Russiagate is pure
bullshit.
As for what the media would do if they really wanted to bring Trump down. They would
attack him on real issues instead of phony ones that actually strengthen trump's
credibility.
"What Would A Democratic Presidency Really Change?"
The same thing it always changes, absolutely nothing except who accepts the bribes from
the elite.
As long as the American people stay asleep they will continue with the "American DREAM"
until they suddenly wake up inside their newly constructed corporate industrial zone. The
prison industrial complex is the model society if you're an elite.
Have a wonderful weekend everyone, don't get so caught up in this sham (s)election that
you ruin what little freedom you have left.
Berlin's Madame Tussauds has put Donald Trump's wax figure into a
dumpster . Is this normal behavior by a museum? Is this not "an interference in the
democratic processes of the United States"? Or is it okay because the Germans are doing it?
(But God forbid if a Russian or an Iranian criticizes a U.S. presidential candidate publicly
ahead of the election.) Have similar performances been staged against Bush, under whom the
U.S. intelligence agencies manufactured claims of Saddam Hussein preparing to use weapons of
mass destruction, which the U.S. "free" media printed almost in unison without any criticism,
leading to an invasion that killed 650,000
Iraqis ? When a visitor beheaded Adolf Hitler's figure in 2008, the same museum
had this to say :
Madame Tussauds is non-political and makes no comment or value-judgement either on the
persons who are exhibited in the Museum or on what they have done during their lifetime.
I guess starting a war that resulted in deaths of 26,000,000 million Soviets -- most of
them Russians -- is not nearly as bad as being a rude person who has once recommended in
private grabbing women by their genitals.
You are clearly over-thinking this, clutching at straws to justify supporting the other
side. Remember the saying "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the
American people". Whoever wins the election is going to be faced with major unrest, the worms
are clearly not going back in the can. There are easier ways to get someone re-elected.
Trump is clearly at least as toxic as any of them wrt foreign policy, however he is not a
globalist and that is his major sin in their eyes.
@ Maureen O # 45 In 2009, Biden tried very hard to convince Obama not to surge 30,000 more troops into
Afghanistan.
Perhaps he was successful? . . . Obama actually surged 70,000 troops into Afghanistan,
raising Bush's 30K to 100K+. That got Mr Hope & Change the Nobel Peace Prize.
We should remember there were 6 UNSC against Iran, and one of them under Chapter 7 ( the
most dangerous), before JCPOA. We should keep in mind there are gang of 5 + 1( 5 in UNSC +
Germany) coalition behind 6 resolutions.
From Iran's eye, Imperialism was, combination of these 5 in the club, and their collateral
and vassals ( Germany, Japan, etc). The master of JCPOA, caught the opportunity to put a
wedge into the body of the club, and it worked perfectly. America is mad cutting her own
arteries, out side the club. Trump or Biden are not different in this regard, America needs
some one to understand the depth of the wound and retreat immediately, before too much
hemorrhage. And such person ( or group ) is not in horizon. Let it die by her own
wounding.
Thank you for that Philip Giraldi report. The descent into madness from the raucus sounds
of the echo chamber. Where does a revolution start?
First they need to dismantle their media concentration across the spectrum of "news"
including all media forms.
Second they need to send their journalists through the same cultural revolution cycle as
was done in the China and other countries where people go to different work supporting the
growth of their communities for a five to ten year separation from the craft of journalism.
Listen to the people and sweat alongside them in their labour to survive.
Sure there is much more but the echo chamber must surely be demolished at
commencement.
I believe back in August 2013 after a CW attack in East Ghouta, east of Damascus, wrongly
blamed on the Syrian govt that Obama was preparing to enforce his no-fly zone threat. Then
the UK parliament voted not to support such a threat, Obama hesitated and then Putin saw his
opportunity and posted an opinion in the New York Times. That ultimately stopped the US from
going ahead with the attack.
I'm sure British MPs have since been forced to "come to their senses".
I linked to and commented upon Pepe's article when it was published by Asia Times a
few days ago, and I don't see any reason to add to it as b echoes much of my sentiment. What
I will do is link to a brief item by Chinese scholar Zhang Weiwei, professor of International
Relations at Fudan University, "How
China elects their political leaders" , which seems very appropriate at this moment in
time:
"China has established a system of meritocracy or what can be described as 'selection plus
election'. Competent leaders are selected on the basis of performance and broad support,
through a vigorous process of screening, opinion surveys, internal evaluations and various
types of elections. This is much in line with the Confucian tradition of meritocracy. After
all, China is the first country that invented civil service examination system or the 'Keju'
system....
"Indeed, the Chinese system of meritocracy today, makes it inconceivable that anyone as
weak as George W. Bush or Donald Trump could ever come close to the position of the top
leadership. It's not far-fetched to claim that the China model is more about leadership
rather than the showmanship as it is in the West. China's meritocratic governance challenges
the stereotypical dichotomy of democracy versus autocracy. From Chinese point of view, the
nature of the state including its legitimacy, has to be defined by its substance, that is,
good governance, competent leadership and success in meeting the people's needs."
Zhang Weiwei is the author of a very important book some may have heard about and even
read, The China Wave: Rise Of A Civilizational State , of which an open preview can be
read here . Also, the professor gave a talk at the German Schiller Institute related to
the above book and the BRI project, which can be read
here .
I've commented several times that China's political-economic system is far superior to the
Parasitic Neoliberalism that's destroying the West. China's success suggests very strongly
that we listen and closely observe while not taking heed of what any Western source has to
say about China.
I'm all for sending the entire Australian news media into a cave for 5 - 10 years. Maybe
in 10,000 years archaeologists investigating the cave will be wondering whether fossil
remains there denote a species of human more primitive than those found in Liang Bua cave on
Flores Island in Indonesia. :-)
Can you elaborate on this funding you referred to for BLM protests? What is your evidence
that it was actually funding street protests? Are you referring to the national corporate
BLM? If so, what does that have to do with leaderless protests in the streets?
From February 13 to February 15, 1945, during the final months of World War II (1939-45),
Allied forces bombed the historic city of Dresden, located in eastern Germany. The bombing
was controversial because Dresden was neither important to German wartime production nor a
major industrial center, and before the massive air raid of February 1945 it had not
suffered a major Allied attack. By February 15, the city was a smoldering ruin and an
unknown number of civilians -- estimated between 22,700 to 25,000–were dead.
Dresden and other cities held magnificent collections of human posterity. Cities of
science - of intellectual excellence and endeavour within europe. Cities of humans associated
with brilliant minds doing the work of human understanding and progress.
Sure Hitler's imbecile adventures ably funded by global private finance capitalism and a
hatred of communism led to war that ultimately led to the vengeful destruction of great
cities and great store houses and museums of this earth of mankind.
Hitler did not bomb Dresden.
Germans were proud of their science and their knowledge and storehouses and museums.
Europe shared in that pride in excellence as did many throughout the world.
Those first shells falling on Berlin TWO months after the demolition of cities of science
and archeology and human history. NOT cities of military significance.
I think of Vietnam
I think of Iraq
I think of Korea
I think of China
I think of Japan
Bombed by UKUSA. So lets not obsess with a dead nazi comrade, lets open our eyes to the
live nazis.
I think Biden will win this presidency, and win it fairly easily. It will become apparent
early on that the Biden Administration intends not only to turn the heat up on Russia, but
will continue Trump's aggression towards China. There may be a feint towards renewing JCPOA,
but it will not be fulfilled, and aggression towards Iran will not abate either.
The Mighty Wurlitzer of pro-war propaganda is again spinning up in anticipation. The
Atlantic and the Economist have been busy comparing Chinese Policy towards it's Muslim
citizens with the Holocaust...Russia, Russia, Russia!!! which never went away is again being
amped up.
But, this isn't 2016. Four years has given China and Russia time to further modernize
their militaries. Iran has developed its missile and drone programs to the point that a
conflict with Israel will result in mutual destruction. In 2016 USA/NATO had the military
advantage, but that is now gone, and the balance shifts further by the day. I almost feel
sorry for Biden, as he will be the one taking the blame when the economy collapses and
America gets their asses handed to them. Hopefully it doesn't go nuclear, but I am not very
optimistic.
With the NeoCon infestation capturing the Democratic Party, the media, and a big chunk of
the Republican, it is only a matter of time before they get their way. Short-sided parasites
as they are, this time they will kill their host. If humanity survives, a new multi-polar era
may emerge.
Uncle tungsten @ 84
Please re-read my heart felt comment. It was sincerely ment. To many here think this is just
fun and speculation.
But this is real, the USA have the same misguided sense of infalalabilty now, that the German
public hand then.
Did we learn nothing from world war 2 ?
Please don't belittle my urgent warning.
This is not a game. Perhaps re read my comment. Respect
Naw, you're not reading me right. Did you check out the Taibbi piece? He has numerous
others over the past 4 years. Also see Les Moonves and other corporate media executives'
statements on Trump during that same time period. I acknowledged that the rank and file among
the media class is largely woke, liberal and pro-Biden (and very anti-Trump), but they don't
call the shots and you're not looking at the situation with enough attention to details. It's
the little things that give it away.
Ever heard the saying "there's no such thing as bad publicity"? A brand like Trump's has
been clearly demonstrated to benefit immensely from the negative coverage. The media are
hated by Trump's followers and the people who watch the media hate Trump. So what does that
tell you? Compare CNN and MSNBC ratings during Trump's term to Obama's. They know that hate
sells and they never call Trump out for his ACTUAL bad behaviors (other than COVID and ACB, I
guess) while they focus on meaningless nonsense, thus distracting the public from the
bi-partisan corporate dominated graft going on and the Empire's ongoing wars and sanctions
programs abroad. Very rarely if ever will you read or hear about the hundreds of thousands of
people who have died due to American sanctions on Iran or Venezuela. Why is that? Because top
brass at the corporate media outlets support it. They cheered when he launched the missiles
at Syria.
Someone did a study or analysis on the amount of air time given to Trump versus the
Democrat primary and it wasn't even close. He plays them and his supporters like a fiddle,
too. SNL had him on NBC when he was running against Hillary. Some argue that this might have
been due to the same mindset that Hillary's team was alleged to have had. Namely, that Trump
would be the EASIEST candidate for her to beat and he had no chance, so he was harmless as a
threat. I don't think it's that complicated. They know what gets ratings.
Yeah, occasionally they'll make a peep about the environment or jobs, but like the
Democrats in Congress and "Intelligence" Community's Russia and Ukraine witch
hunts/impeachment they intentionally ignore the types of actions that DO justify
investigations and impeachments. Do you honestly think that the Democrats thought Trump would
be removed from office for the bogus "whistle blower" charges they ginned up? Of course not -
the Senate was never going to go along with it and it wasn't exactly secret, even over here
across the pond it was obvious.
As far as him not being a globalist - he's not exactly anti-globalist when it comes to
policy, but why would that matter to the corporate media? Again, it's the corporate big wigs
and majority shareholders who make the calls and the reporters, editors and personalities on
TV know how to toe the line without being told explicitly. Now, if you want to talk Silicon
Valley and the social media giants, I'm with you - they are actively trying to help Joe
Biden. But take another example - the Hunter Biden laptop story. Social media giants censored
it, but it isn't like it's not being talked about non-stop by the MSM and newspapers. They
just don't talk about what was IN the emails or photos, leaving some of their viewers/readers
curious to go find out for themselves.
I didn't read jinn's comment in detail, but I'm definitely not trying to make points that
justify voting for Biden; but I stand by my points - I'm just pointing out what's REALLY
going on with all of the "negative" coverage of Donald Trump in the corporate mainstream
media. At the end of the day, the corporate MSM upper brass doesn't really care who gets
elected, but they also understand that having a "heel" (from the pro wrestling world) and
"bad guy" to always go after on crap that's ultimately meaningless, makes it easier to sell
the hate and drive ratings and subscriptions.
Uncle tungsten @ 84
Please re-read my heart felt comment. It was sincerely ment. To many here think this is
just fun and speculation.
But this is real, the USA have the same misguided sense of infalalabilty now, that the
German public hand then.
Did we learn nothing from world war 2 ?
Please don't belittle my urgent warning.
This is not a game. Perhaps re read my comment. Respect
Respect and apology in return Mark2. I jumped the gun.
Yes, the sense of infallibility infuses the bloodlust of the UKUSAi.
With any luck humanity will be spared their obscene and lunatic 'reprisal mania' that has
rotted their minds. I somehow doubt that.
And I share your fear.
That said though - I am ever the optimist. There are many warrior clans of past decades
that have made delightful blunders and ended up on the block instead of on the grog in the
opponents bars. Time will tell.
I believe it is time for the great people of South America to shake off these barnacles on
the arse of humanity once and for all.
Sorry I got a little long winded in my last reply. I think this response will make my
position easier to interpret.
You asked: " What the hell would they do if they wanted him removed?"
The answer to that question is the same as the answer would be if you asked what the
Democrats in Congress would (have) do(ne) if they really wanted to remove him from office.
They would actually investigate and attempt to prosecute a litany of possible crimes rather
than silly, simplistic accusations from a "whistleblower" that anyone with a IQ over 100
could see was not going to work.
Maybe you're right and I'm wrong, and Americans really are that stupid. It wouldn't
necessarily conflict with what I've seen and heard from Democrat supporting relatives and
social media contacts. A lot, if not most of them STILL believe that there was collusion
between Trump and Russia. It was like my conservative friends and relatives for about a
decade after the Iraq war - they were CONVINCED that we DID find WMDs and that the US media
had somehow hidden it.
@vk #65
It is striking how you still refuse to acknowledge the reality of the law.
The United States is not a majoritarian democracy.
In fact, there is not one single country in the entire world that is a majoritarian
democracy.
If the law were changed via the methods already written, tried and true, then I guarantee
that there would be a lot more voters in the minorities of both red and blue states.
As it is, the only partisan here is your and the Democratic party's whining about how they
have more popular votes, much as the talk about packing the Supreme Court, etc etc.
If ultimately the existing laws of the land are merely an impediments to anyone doing
whatever they have the power to do, then there is no law.
Uncle @ 90
Thanks for that. I feel we are in full agreement !
To perhaps clarify to those less astute than you.
My comment @ 68 points out the law of unintended consequence. The majority of Americans don't
want war, riots, poverty and distruction. They want to keep there families safe.
The comparison being the same can be said for Germans prior to the war, they weren't evil as
portrayed in history they simply made the same mistake the US is about to make. With the
consequence of there country devistated. A dreadful mistake voting for the wrong man, whipped
up by a false sense of superiority !
Don't do it.
Half of America won't tolerate it.
Free quarters of the rest of the world won't. By voting trump you vote for your own
distruction.
I would rather vote for a donkey, never mind Biden.
You are clearly over-thinking this, clutching at straws to justify supporting the other
side.
__________________________________________
What other side???
I'm guessing you are accusing me of supporting trump but who knows maybe you think I'm
supporting Biden. Either way it is stupid of you to project your "side" based logic onto
others. Do you really think it is impossible to analyze without first taking a side?
As it is, the only partisan here is your and the Democratic party's whining about how they
have more popular votes, much as the talk about packing the Supreme Court, etc etc.
Thank you, I liked that retort to vk. Can I distort your point that while the Demonazis
delude themselves in more popular votes - the Repugnents have more of the un-popular votes.
The deeply corrosive nonsense being shouted into the demonazi echo chamber is truly dangerous
to the point that they will generate a standing wave resonance and collapse the entire
building. Trouble is we will then have to endure an 11/11 to compete with their absurd 9/11
and - we'll never hear the end of it. :))
James
I share one bottle of wine a month. I don't do drugs, but thanks for asking.
I note you don't ask the 'right wing' to step a way'
But if the truth is hurting you. Perhaps you ought ?
Have a peaceful night.
I remember you as being a reasonably sane contributor ...
Thanks!
= ... but atm you have a serious case of TDS.
No. I'm neither for nor against Trump. I see him as a symptom of the system who has joined
(possibly long ago) Team Deep State (the managers of the Empire). If it wasn't Trump, it
would be some other media-savvy guy that can con the people.
= Are you seriously trying to tell us that the last 4 years of US media foaming at the
mouth about Trump (Russia-gate, Trump supporters being 'white supremacists' and egging on a
race war) were all a plot to get him re-elected?
IMO Trump's economic nationalism and zenophobia were very much planned. As was the failure
of the Democrats to mount any effective resistance. They pretend to hate Trump so so
much but shoot themselves in the foot all the time.
Russiagate was nothing more than a new McCarthyism. That works well for the Deep State
both internationally and domestically. Any dissenter is called a "knowing or unknowing"
Russian asset.
Background: I've written that Trump was meant to beat Hillary. The 2016 election was a
farce. Sanders and Trump were friendly with the Clintons for a very long time. Sanders was a
sheepdog (not a real candidate) and Hillary threw the race to Trump. Trump is much more
capable at what he does than Hillary would've been.
I mean seriously? WTF? What the hell would they do if they wanted him
removed?
If the Deep State wanted him removed (but they don't) they would find a reason to invoke
the 25th Amendment. They have positioned people to do this, if necessary. For example: VP
Pence was a friend of McCain (who was a 'NEVER TRUMP'-er); Atty General Barr is close to the
Bushes and Mueller ('NEVER TRUMP'-ers); CIA Dir. Gina Haspel is an acolyte of John Brennan
(you guessed it, a 'NEVER TRUMP'-er).
=
MarkU @Oct31 23:18 #76
...he is not a globalist and that is his major sin in their eyes.
He's not anti-globalist as you seem to suggest. He's even bragged about his business
dealings with Chinese, Arabs, Russians - pretty much any group with money.
Trump and the Deep State - the true Deep State, not the pretended partisan off-shoot
- are EMPIRE-FIRST (and have been for decades). You can see this in what Trump has done
globally. USA just wants a bigger cut of the action because they have to do the 'heavy
lifting' of taking on China and Russia.
<> <> <> <> <> <>
I know that my cynical perspective must generate a lot of cognitive dissonance in many
readers. But I don't see any other way to rationally explain Deep State actions and the
history that has brought us to where are today.
The numbers are there for everybody to see: Trump won with 3 million + votes below Hilary
Clinton. That is not democracy in any sense of the word unless you go back to the more
traditional forms of liberalism of the 16th-19th centuries. Those are the numbers, not my
opinion.
Besides, I think you're not getting the irony of your position: the situation in the USA
has gotten so degenerated that you're hanging by a thread - a thread you put on a golden
pedestal and claim is the salvation of the Empire (the electoral college). Where did I see
this? Oh, yes - the War of Secession of 1861-1865, when the slave states were already
outnumbered 6 to 1 by the northern states. They kept their parity artificially for decades,
until the whole thing suddenly burst up in the war (a war where they were crushed; no chance
of victory at all).
So, the problem isn't in the system per se, but the pressure the ossification of the
system is building up. When they seceded, the confederates genuinely thought they were the
true inheritors of the liberal thought, the slave states being the most perfect manifestation
of freedom; the same situation is building up today, albeit, obviously, on a much milder
scale (there's no California gold this time, just the good ol' race to the bottom).
--//--
Posted by: uncle tungsten | Nov 1 2020 2:25 utc | 95
I agree with you: the end of the electoral college (with it, any form of district vote)
will give a chance for the conservatives (Republicans) to win back, for example, California
(which has 40-46% of the popular vote). But it will also give the Democrats Texas (Dallas +
Houston regions already make almost 50% of the population of the state and are Democratic
bastions). It will also open the gates for third parties to flourish (avoiding a situation
like Bernie Sanders, who had to affiliate to the Democrats).
Either way, it will give the American people and government a more honest, precise picture
of the state of the nation. Or are you willing to live a perpetual illusion of "coastal
elites vs heartland deplorables" forever (which, by the way, only fuels up secession as the
only solution)?
The myth of HIQ whitemen....
--------------------------------------
Caitlin[for prez]johnston
Russia gate morphes seamlessly into China gate without missing a beat.
One hiq white man opines, oh so innocently
IN Russia gate, they were quoting only anon, nameless witness.
This time its different, we've real witness testifying on teevee , in Tucker
[fuck China] Carlson show, no less !
The poor dear was referring to an 'ex CIA' [see, an insider, wink wink ] telling
Tucker [fuck CHINA] Carlson ....
Psssst, many dem were CCP trojans !
ROFLAMO
oR that HUnter BIden buddy whatshisname again, who told Tucker [fuck China] Carlson oh so
solemnly,
'Yes , I think the BIdens were compromised by the chicoms'
OMFG ! BIden is CCP'S man !
What happen if Biden get into the WH and immediately bomb Shanghai.?
Well half of gringos , the Trumpsters, would scream,
'Why isnt BIden bombing Beijing already, well BCOS we all know he's Xi's man in Washington'
!
The dems, eager to clear their potus name, would implore earnestly,
'Hey BIden, you should invade Beijing RIGHT now, show them repuc we are just as tough, no,
even better in showing the chicoms who's the boss around here.
What a devious brilliant way to get a bi partisan support for more
wars.
BI partisan ?
That practically cover 99% of HIQ gringos. hehehhehehhe
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me hundreds of times.........
I agree with all you points PO, rather those complaining about Russia are throwing a bunch
of contradictory self-serving and ultimately emotional accusations and complaints that
very much echo western foreign policy after the Cold War of Do Something, regardless
of how dumb, damaging and even making the situation much worse for those who they supposedly
are claiming to help. DO SOMETHING! My response is 'WTF don't YOU do something
youselves ? Put your body, blood and mind on the line if you really care so much
rather than typing on a keyboard thousands of miles away in great comfort. Keyboard warrior
wankers!
Those actually running the west aren't much different which is why they go for the easy
option of flying above 20,000ft and dropping bombs rather than sending very large numbers of
troops to hold ground and have a quick result. Why? Because they are afraid of bodybags and
how they might look. That is the crux. They're more afraid being turned against by the
electorate so 'easy solutions' that look good but don't deliver are the order of the day.
They just can't stand the real cost or be courageous enough to spell it out to the public
that their words if taken at face value means quite a lot of death. It doesn't sell.
I don't understand the current situation in full context but it seems that Armenian
leadership has whored themselves to Western interest. And the whore-wanabe's pictured above
are eager to sell their souls as well.
Russia's take may be to let Armenia face consequences of that decision to align with the
Western empire. And, it will be up to the Armenian population to remove the leadership that
chose Western allegiance if they so chose.
Russian leadership (showing great wisdom in my opinion) shuns imposition of
the-right-thing-to-do on a population that is too lazy or too fearful or too accommodating of
a whoring leadership. Russia has learned its lesson about helping other nations at great
expense to itself and then expecting gratitude or loyalty. As noted by others, the only
nation to do such has been Serbia.
The above Russian strategy is likely predicated on the belief that the Western empire is
wobbly and nearing the tipping point. Russian leadership appears to have concluded that it
now time to disconnect Russia from the Western economic system to escape the coming
calamity.
MOSCOW, October 31. /TASS/. Moscow will provide all necessary assistance to Yerevan in
accordance with the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance between the two
countries, if hostilities spill over to Armenia's territory, the Russian Foreign Ministry
said in a statement on Friday.
I am sure word will soon arrive here from Finland about this matter, namely about what
Russia should do but, as a result of its inherent weakness, most certainly will not do.
You may find things different by mid-November, as Armenia has – allegedly –
formally asked for Russian help. Here's a particularly pithy and realistic quote;
"In the modern world, you must either have your own heavily armed army combined with a
strong economy that can support it, or you must be friends with those who have it (here's a
hint, either Russia or China, because we see the results of Pashinyan and Lukashenko's
friendship with Europe and the US online today). The usual liberal mantras of
"Russia-Armenia-Belarus have no enemies" are good exactly as long as you are not attacked in
reality, and not on the Internet or in the media. And no assurances of American and European
friendship will save you. You'll be lucky if they don't take you apart themselves."
Remember when Pashinyan was elected, and the protests which swept him to power? Remind you
of anybody? Poroshenko, maybe? Not to suggest Pashinyan is a powerful oligarch – to all
appearances he is not. But he came to power by the same mechanisms – playing public
naivety like a violin, quoting hopeful citizens who really believe a different face is the
magic bullet which will blow away corruption, and receiving the benevolent blessing of the
west that the election was just as fair as fair could be. It always is, so long as the
western-preferred candidate gets 'elected'.
"Historically, Armenia's elections have been marred by fraud and vote-buying.
However, international observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in
Europe said the elections had respected fundamental freedoms and were characterised by
genuine competition."
You'd think that kind of boilerplate would have lost its power to make me laugh, but by
God, it still tickles me; "characterised by genuine competition" – oh, 'pon my word,
yes! You, like others, may have noticed by now that all it takes in certain countries to
eliminate any possibility of 'genuine competition' is advance polls which indicate the
western-disliked incumbent will win easily. That's how the people plan to vote, but that
counts for nothing – it's only 'genuine competition' if there is a realistic
possibility the west's man (or woman) will get in, and the more likely that looks to happen,
damned if the competition does not get more genuine. Nobody seems to notice that the
'competition' reaches the very zenith of 'genuineness' just about the time nobody has a
chance of holding off a landslide win by the preferred candidate.
I think by now everybody who reads here knows how I feel about it; you can't really blame
the west and its media outlets for behaving the way they do. The western countries are mostly
run by wealthy venture capitalists, and what wealthy venture capitalists like best is
acquiring and controlling more wealth. This should not be a surprise to anyone. Even when
western venture capitalists are dead altruistic and benevolent, what they want is for more
wealth and capital to be acquired and controlled by the country to whom they feel the most
sentimental attachment, so that a few of their countrymen might do all right out of their
maneuvering as well – these are the people who come to be regarded as
'philanthropists', like George Soros. But generally they are mostly in it for themselves.
No, what I find the most objectionable is the veneer of holier-than-though goodness which
always covers western exploitation ops. They always have to pretend like a smash-and-grab
crime is some kind of fucking religious moment just because it is they who are doing it, as
if they bring rectitude to even the most blatant self-interest. When the truth of the matter
is that what the powerful do not give even the tiniest trace of a fuck about – Locard
himself could not detect it – is what life is going to be like afterward for the
average citizen in the country targeted for exploitation by changing its leadership. You
know, the ones jumping up and down in Independence Square (there's always an Independence
Square), or walking around with big dumb grins on their faces as if they have just felt the
planet shift under their feet.
It's worth mentioning here that the period during which the west – led, of course,
by the United States and its government/venture-capital institutions – was the most
optimistic about Russia was the moment when it looked like a class of wealthy venture
capitalists was going to take over the running of what was left of the Soviet Union; the
Khodorkovskys and the Berzovskys and the Abramovitches. The wealthy Boyars who, albeit they
spoke a different language, really spoke the same language to the letter as their western
counterparts.
And the official western perspective on Russia made an abrupt turn to the South, and grew
progressively grimmer, the more evident it became that that was not going to happen.
"Venture capitalists" may not be the most accurate terminology for those who run the West.
There are a lot of old power blocks including the Vatican, the British royals, Zionists and
other groups who get along well enough not to openly attack each other but will protect their
particular areas of dominance. Their glue are narcissistic/messianic beliefs of their right
to rule humanity. There may be deeper and murkier layers in the ruling hierarchy. I say
"ruling" but their rule is only to the degree that we do not care enough to resist.
The interesting thing is that these demonic forces are nearly entirely of a Western
origin. Is there a genetic factor that has become concentrated in the ruling elites? Some
other self-propagating driver of their beliefs?
I do believe that Russia and China are sorting and identifying the real actors in the
Western ruling elites.
A very interesting and thought-provoking reply. I think we must be careful to not just
'study it, judiciously as you will', while 'history's actors' reshape reality around us.
It seems to me that whatever the behavior of Armenia, Russia is still expected to
protect/save christians in the region regardless of all the s/t that is thrown at them and
particularly knowing the blood thirsty history of Az/turcoman/whatever behavior against
Armenians.
There is a point here as Russia presents itself as the leader of the Orthodox Christian
world it is its actual duty to rise above (pthe etty nasty s/t) and protect christendom in
the hood regardless
But, and as we all know, the having the cake and eat it crowd has only but expanded, most
notably those who are pro-west. They are owed it and thus they demand it as they are
considered and have been told that they are a cut above the rest. It's the same western
'benefit of the doubt' that allows its intellectuals to support successive foreign policy
adventures that have ended in catastrophic failure but even worse left those that they
pledged to help in a much worse position.
I also think that in this case most people really do not know that Armenia is run by a
pro-western government. It's not exactly hot news. And its still not widely reported let
alone. After all, the western media is not exorciating Washington, Berlin, Paris and London
for doing f/k all to help Armenia. They've been mostly silent. No need to point out yet again
that the west picks and choses which countries/territories to carve up in contravention of
long standing international law, and which others it strictly abides by, in this case
Nagorno-Karabakh.
This may well be in part of being stung by the highly successful and bloodless return of
the Crimea to Russia which was done in line with international law regardless of western
protestations. It really put their carving off Kosovo by extreme violence in an very bad
light by comparison and cannot be denied any longer as 'not a precedent' if they claim Russia
took over Crimea illegally. The West has really tied itself in to a gordian knot at the
international and state level despite doing its best to ignore it at home. The rest of the UN
members don't buy it in the least.
So back to the beginning, who to blame? Russia is the easiest target. Surely not the west
who is also selling weapons to Azerbaidjan, buys its gas and give the dictatorship a free
pass. And even less so i-Sreal selling weapons, another people that has suffered the fate of
genocide. No. Russia has to do something!
And, or, is it also their argument that despite 'Russia not respecting international law'
that in this case it is an 'exception' (but not a 'precedent' (!)) and their failure to do so
is inexcusable? It really is the most gigantic load of bollocks.
Just a few points – Russia's defense of Christendom may be limited to Orthodoxy as
the rest are spinoffs or spinoffs of spinoffs. Christian religious values in the west hardly
resemble core Christian values so why should Russia give a damn about protecting such
Christians? If the Armenia Orthodox church is comfortable with, if not endorsing, LGBT? life
styles, then they would likely be considered as non-Christian. I do not know if the forgoing
is the case; just discussing implications.
Russia will fulfill its obligations to defend Armenia from armed attack. However, once
Azerbaijan has gotten what it wants, there will be no incentive for an attack on Armenia and
especially so considering the dire consequences of a Russian military response.
I remember when my wife asked an old priest here after our youngest's christening into the
ROC if we could get wed in said church. He told her we couldn't because I wasn't a
Christian.
She begged to differ, but he insisted that I was a heretic and would have to baptized
according to ROC rights and after having had ROC catechism lessons.
He was right too and twofold: (i) all "Christian" faiths are heresies, aberrations of the
true, correct liturgy as passed on from the apostles and (ii) I am a heretic of a pagan
nature.
I have a soft spot for pagan beliefs as well. There are nonphysical entities that we
interact, mostly without awareness, on a daily basis. No big deal, we just need to be mindful
of such realities to better understand why things happen the way they do. The Woke folks
could not possibly understand such, being isolated in their hall-of-mirrors tight little
self-contained world of self-importance with the firm conviction that they are the be-all and
end-all. A peasant toiling in the fields or a kid in the slums understand reality better the
the Wokest of the Woke. Am I serious? I don't know.
There's a report the other day that China's massive planting of trees is estimated to soak
up to 35% of the carbon dioxide it produces industrially. The data comes from ground level
station, satellite and other sources.
Which leads me to this question. If farmers (in u-Rope) are now being paid not to grow
food, then wtf not just plant forests of trees that can also be farmed and managed? Is it
because it is too easy and there's not much profit in it?
Trees are central to Germanic paganism. How can one not respect a tree such as the mighty
oak that is at least 500 years old when mature and may live for 1,000 years and more? Such
living things interact with us -- of course, they do, if "only" in the maintainance of an
ecological balance of the gas that is necessary for our existence.
That bastard Charles "the Great" of the Franks waged relentless war for over 30 years
against the Saxons (not the "Anglo-Saxons, but my kinfolk in what is now Lower saxony in
Germany) because of their refusal to accept Christianity.
Too right they didn't, for they knew full that if they had, the would have fallen under
the thrall of the person who styled himself as emperor of the Western Roman Empire that had
fallen into dissolution some 300 years earlier, which reborn "Roman Empire" had as its state
religion Christianity -- Roman Christianity that is, and its emperor, much later styled as
the "Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation", was guess who? That's right, Charles the
Great/Carolus Magnus/ Karl der Grosse/Charlemagne.
One of Charles' favourite tricks in subduing the Saxons was making public spectacles of
hacking down their "holy" trees or " Irminsul . After one victory against rebellious
Saxon pagans whose lands the Franks had invaded, Charles had them all baptised -- then had
them beheaded, all 4,500 of them!
Einhard, Charlemagne's biographer, said on the closing of the conflict:
The war that had lasted so many years was at length ended by their acceding to the
terms offered by the King; which were renunciation of their national religious customs and
the worship of devils, acceptance of the sacraments of the Christian faith and religion, and
union with the Franks to form one people.
So the Saxons started eating small pieces of bread that they were to believe was god,
which is far more reasonable than believing that trees and rivers and forests and storms were
worthy of their respect.
Right! I'm off to my holy grove in order to pay my respects to Woden.
Okay, you've baited me (love to spend more time here but I do appreciate the occasional
glance and many great comments and discussions)
"But veneration is inherent in the human breast. Presently mankind, emerging from
intellectual infancy, began to detect absurdity in creation without a Creator, in effects
without causes. As yet, however, they did not dare to throw upon a Single Being the whole
onus of the world of matter, creation, preservation, and destruction. Man, instinctively
impressed by a sense of his own unworthiness, would hopelessly have attempted to conceive the
idea of a purely Spiritual Being, omnipotent and omnipresent.
Awestruck by the admirable phenomena and the stupendous powers of Nature, filled with a
sentiment of individual weakness, he abandoned himself to a flood of superstitious fears, and
prostrated himself before natural objects, inanimate as well as animate. Thus comforted by
the sun and fire, benefited by wind and rain, improved by hero and sage, destroyed by wild
beasts, dispersed by convulsions of Nature, he fell into a rude, degrading, and *cowardly
Fetissism*, the *faith of fear*, and *the transition state from utter savagery to
barbarism*."
• "The Jew, The Gypsy and El Islam" by Richard Francis Burton
The Blob will dominate the USA foreign policy, no matter who wins.
Notable quotes:
"... I've commented several times that China's political-economic system is far superior to the Parasitic Neoliberalism that's destroying the West. China's success suggests very strongly that we listen and closely observe while not taking heed of what any Western source has to say about China. ..."
"... The executives and majority shareholders of the CIA/NSA infiltrated corporate news media don't care whether Trump wins, and in fact often prefer it. ..."
"... Those guys are just part of the polarization narrative tearing the country apart. The hatred is real but there is acting involved, especially with Olbermann. These commentators feel that this polarization narrative is giving the country what it wants and it drives ratings. Schiff is just a first class liar ... ..."
"... Obama was just put in the pipeline as one of their possible future candidates for president. They have a stable of these people being mentored. Clinton was one as well. I bet Harris is one as well. ..."
"... I think they hate the Trumper so much because he he was in some else's stable. Possibly the controllers from campus in Tel Aviv. Different stable, same horse shit. ..."
"... Election of president = false flag iperation. The purpose is to fund the private media with advertising revenue paid for by consumer taxpayers. ..."
"... The rest of the world knows that the US is not agreement capable, it does not matter for Iran one bit what happens on November 3rd. ..."
"... I understand the rationale behind Trump's policies. But my conclusion is exactly the opposite: his attempt to stop the disintegration of the American Empire is accelerating the disintegration of the American Empire, not averting it. ..."
"... The key here is to understand that that's not how the American Empire should work. The USA continues to deindustrialize at an accelerated pace under Trump; Wall Street was never stronger than under Donald Trump; American debt was never higher. And now, unemployment is as high as during the 1929 era. ..."
"... The American Empire is the American Empire precisely because it doesn't need to produce anything it needs except defense. It prints money in order to siphon wealth from the rest of the world, enriching its economy while impoverishing the rest. That's the only way the Empire can function - any other way will result in its destruction. ..."
"... Obama ran on Hopey-Changey and on his projected charm, actually glib con-man gab. Worked wonderfully, imagine getting the Nobel Prize because you had a dead-beat Dad who was from Kenya and you scored B+ for public speaking? Argh. (The real reason: killing will continue, the status quo is preserved..) ..."
"... That Trump would win in 2016 was obvious as soon as he became a candidate. He was the cartoon contrast of Obomber - white, fat, orange, tall, R vs. D, outspoken, strident, clumsy (vs. the smooth-talking con), opinionated, stupid, and outrageous in a way. Click bait and viewer bait for the MSM - but not for no reason. ..."
"... To pretend that Trump is some special Peacemaker, trying oh so hard to overcome deep state resistance to rolling back empire, is Trumpism. Escobar is always there. Trump must be understood as a leading creature of the swamp himself. Trying so hard just as Obama was trying so hard. ..."
"... The relative scores settled terribly are more a matter of opportunity than ruthless efficiency. Though it is true that "success" requires dialing it back a bit, and having the likes of Bolton around is a way of ensuring either that nothing gets done, or we all end up ashes. Trump managed to axe Bolton on time, that time. ..."
I do agree with you both that the anti-Trump hysteria has probably worked for him to
some extent but I really don't believe that is a four year long plan, it is too much of a
stretch to believe that the likes of Olbermannn and Schiff are consciously working for him.
American politics really is that toxic, remember the stuff about Obama's birth
certificate.
I also agree that Trump might actually have the support needed for a landslide win, not
so much because of the vilification but because of the arson and looting imo. A lot of
Trump supporters are keeping their heads down atm (and who can blame them) However, now it
is my turn to make a prediction. I predict mass unrest on polling day. it is well accepted
that the majority of the Democrat voters (fraudulent or not) are going to vote by post.
Conversely most Trump supporters are likely to vote in person on the day (or try to at
least)
I expect a concerted attempt to disrupt the polls by people who know that it will
disproportionately affect the Trump vote. I expect violent clashes (with both sides trading
blame) and a result that will please nobody. The worms are not going back into the can.
if I am wrong then I will be big enough to say so on the first appropriate thread on
this site, fair enough?
Zhang Weiwei is the author of a very important book some may have heard about and
even read, The China Wave: Rise Of A Civilizational State, of which an open preview can
be read here. Also, the professor gave a talk at the German Schiller Institute related to
the above book and the BRI project, which can be read here.
I've commented several times that China's political-economic system is far
superior to the Parasitic Neoliberalism that's destroying the West. China's success
suggests very strongly that we listen and closely observe while not taking heed of what
any Western source has to say about China.
I just paused by their tavern to see what elixirs of despair or mirth they have on offer
today. Pour a strong drink comrades and scroll through the cellar. Always worth a
visit.
If Biden is not much different from Trump then why does "the blob" portray Trump as
the Beelzebub? Posted by: m | Nov 1 2020 6:01 utc | 112
Because he's the heel and none of the negative coverage they give him sticks, most often
on purpose. Don't mistake their serious tones and somber pronouncements for genuineness.
It's not. The executives and majority shareholders of the CIA/NSA infiltrated corporate
news media don't care whether Trump wins, and in fact often prefer it.
I am aware of the fact that corruption is rife in both parties. I saw the link to the
Biden bus incident, deplorable yes but hardly on the same scale as the massive rioting,
looting and intimidation of the BLM movement, they didn't actually burn down half the
neighborhood did they. Organized voting obstruction will largely be confined to swing
states for obvious reasons. I made my predictions, we will see.
Just to be clear, I don't even live in the US, I am British. If I did live in the US I
wouldn't vote for either party, I'm not a 'lesser of two evils' kind of guy. To be frank I
am viewing events in the US with considerable trepidation, I regard what happens in the US
as a window into the likely future of the UK and the rest of Europe. I fear that a nuclear
war may well occur sometime in the near future, quite possibly by accident owing to the
continual cutting of warning times, mainly by the US. A very powerful nuclear armed country
convulsed by civil unrest is a very dangerous entity, I fear the worst and so should we all
imo.
Anyway thank you for being polite and civilised and for including actual information
with your replies.
OT..I just read this translation from a Russian link...most agreeable as a counterpoise to
Exceptional Nation nuttiness:
"Construction of the industrial complex, where high-speed trains will be produced,
began in the Urals. In five years, Russia will have a domestic rolling stock for the VSM
- high-speed highways. Moreover, the level of localization of production is stated at
80%, which means additional orders for the Russian industry."
I do agree with you both that the anti-Trump hysteria has probably worked for him
to some extent but I really don't believe that is a four year long plan, it is too much
of a stretch to believe that the likes of Olbermannn and Schiff are consciously working
for him. American politics really is that toxic, remember the stuff about Obama's birth
certificate.
Those guys are just part of the polarization narrative tearing the country apart.
The hatred is real but there is acting involved, especially with Olbermann. These
commentators feel that this polarization narrative is giving the country what it wants and
it drives ratings. Schiff is just a first class liar ...
As far as Obama's birth certificate, since his mom was a CIA officer using the Ford
Foundation as cover during the murder of millions of leftists in Indonesia, I am sure she
took time out to make sure he was born on US soil. All that stuff about him growing up on
embassy row in Indonesia while the left was being slaughtered is carefully taken out of the
story. Not his fault but it was quite a slaughter of humans and we know her employer was
deeply involved. Going into the Indonesian villages to do studies. Really, studies and
observations. They used to call it SOG groups.
Obama was just put in the pipeline as one of their possible future candidates for
president. They have a stable of these people being mentored. Clinton was one as well. I
bet Harris is one as well.
I think they hate the Trumper so much because he he was in some else's stable.
Possibly the controllers from campus in Tel Aviv. Different stable, same horse
shit.
I think they hate the Trumper so much because he he was in some else's stable. Possibly
the controllers from campus in Tel Aviv. Different stable, same horse shit.
Because the FBI's evidence cleaner/tamperer division's mandate will be greatly expanded,
as will the powers of the Silicone Valley Tekkies to more comprehensively throttle public
free speech on electronic media, that the deep state's Invisible Hand disapproves of.
Trump is about controlled demolition of the empire NemesisCalling @ 5.
B summarized the style differences very well. But failed to mention the greater problem.
3 votes at polls every four years is not democracy<= no American is in charge of any
thing the USA does.
the layers in the global power stack (each nation state the same):
layer 1: global franchisor sets rules of play; establishes goals <=local nation
state franchisees must obtain to remain in power.
Layer 2: oligarch <= national (wall street beneficiaries who use their wealth to
conform national outcome consistent with global powers).
Layer 3: copyright y patent monopoly power constitute 90% of corporate Assets.
Layer 4: think tank and other private orgs
public<= layer 5: 527 elected government <= a tool to regulate members of
public
Layer 6: Intergov Bureaucracies limit and direct elected power to global goals.
public<= layer 7: the 340,000,000 members of the media regulated public
layer 8: stop and go economic system control
layer 9: media controls info environment & public narrative (many
techniques)
all layers but 5 and 7 are contained within an envelop of privately owned control
freaks.
Election of president = false flag iperation. The purpose is to fund the private
media with advertising revenue paid for by consumer taxpayers.
Article II and amendment 12 clearly deny American people any say in who is to be the P
and VP of the USA.
Agree with Nemesiscalling, since 1947, standing orders from Layer 1<= demo the
American excellence; deny superior economic power to average Americans . standing orders
<=homogenize the world and standardize its governance.
American lifestyle and quality of life is indifferent to who the media puts into the
white house.
by c1ue @ 26 said it best "Anyone against the "right" and "proper" Democrat sellouts to
pharma, tech and enviro must be rednecks. It is precisely this view that galvanized the
vote against HRC in 2016." the method used by the public layers is reflected here, it is
called divide and conquer.
B reviewed the elements and factors that maintain the division of the masses..
On the absence of a real left in the US ( is all right and more right..)and of a real
program which could include real changes that could make any difference in people´s
lives, on that what matters is political technology and communication based on demonizing
the other candidate which translates in deep polarizing of societies with unexpected
unknown consequences..
" If Trump were re-elected for another four years, it would be a real calamity and
armed conflicts could even break out by the most radical groups, so that the country
could be paralyzed "
"The ideological profile and policy of the United States is that of the president and,
each one, even if they are from the same party, has maintained quite different political
lines throughout history", says Rafael García, professor of International
Relations at the USC. For this reason, he affirms that, in North America, "there is no
strong party structure, but rather that the party acts as an electoral structure and it
is on the candidates of each moment that certain policies are formed."
DEMOCRATS VS. REPUBLICANS. So much so that, as the professor explains, "the
ideological configuration of the parties in the 20th century changed radically". On the
one hand, he alludes to the fact that the Democrat, "in historical terms, was the party
of the southern states, when they faced each other in the Civil War; racist states, which
lasted until the 1920s ". Precisely, the political scientist indicates that "it was
shortly before when the change took place, with the Roosevelt presidency, that he decided
to change the configuration of the Democratic party as a result of the crisis of 29".
On the other hand, the Republican party, he points out, "was that of the union, that
of the northern states, championed by Lincoln; the abolitionist party and that of the
blacks ". So how did these changes come about until today? Rafael García
points to "a consequence of the political strategies that the presidents embodied at
all times, not because there was an ideological line behind each party ."
TRY TO ASSIMILATE THE AMERICAN MODEL TO THE EUROPEAN. For Rafael García, the
Spaniards, when speaking of US politics, "make a mistake in translating our political
structures" to those there. In other words, "in Europe the duality between left and
right is widely assumed and we unconsciously transfer it to US policy." "That is a
complete error" , sentence.
And it is that there " there is neither right nor left, there is right and more
right ", affirms the professor. Which means that there does not exist and did not
exist a historical labor-union party as such. In fact, the transmutation that is usually
made from the democratic party to 'social democratic' is not correct . For
García, Biden embodies "a more moderate man than the crazy Trump, but that does
not mean that he has some kind of relationship with a left-wing thought ."
RIGHT AND RIGHT. "A multimillionaire gentleman, absolute representative of the
establishment" (referring to Biden), and "a traditional gentleman, more conservative"
(referring to Trump) ". "Although Biden is a Democrat, who perhaps holds stronger
principles and is hopeful, identifying him with the left is still a long way from
reality," he says. Therefore, it is denied that the Democrats are the American left
and the Republicans the right .
THE CAMPAIGN LACKS PROGRAMMATIC INTEREST. For the USC political scientist, the US
electoral campaign lacks interest: "It is absurd, it seems like a disqualification
competition in which a political or government program is not exposed ." And every
time Spain is also getting closer to that model of disputes.
"We are Americanized, in the sense that the weight of the parties is also
being diluted in Spain in favor of the candidatesThese advisers are responsible
for the growing division that is taking place in Western society ," he says.
THE GOVERNMENT IN THE HANDS OF POLITICAL ADVISORS. In Rafael García's opinion,
the decision margin "is shrinking", that is, "the autonomy capacity of governments to
make decisions is smaller, and they are conditioned ". So, what is the difference, in
practice, in management, between PP and PSOE? "Little thing, in the end, little thing,"
he asserts.
That is why " that little thing can not be said to the voter, but must be mobilized
with a degree of identification, unconditional adherence, so that it can be recognized in
a brand ." And what is this transformation of Spanish politics due to? The professor
is clear about it: " It is a translation of commercial marketing techniques to
politics." Thus, a marketing advisor must "build customer loyalty" and a political
advisor should build voter loyalty .
Now, if there are no significant differences between the two options, how to
achieve it? "Through a demonization of the opposite and the creation of a hostility that
is dangerous, because the divisions to which society is returning are irreconcilable
." In this way, García believes that " it is the work of political advisers
who, apart from the difficulties that exist in societies, which are many, polarize them
when it comes to building and mobilizing a faithful electorate, to the point that they
make no difference what the party says or what the leader says ".
In the United States, as evidenced by this expert, "it does not matter if Trump
does the atrocities he does, or if he said in the previous campaign that he could murder
a person on Fifth Avenue in New York without anything happening to him ." This,
transferred to the Spanish sphere, "assumes that the party can do any outrage: fraud,
embezzlement, illegal financing ...". "That is something we are seeing, whatever party it
is, but for the faithful voter it does not matter, because their party will continue to
be so and will continue to listen to the channel and read the newspaper that supports
it," he says.
THE ELECTORAL RESULT WILL BE EXTENDED OVER TIME. "I have no idea nor do I want to make
forecasts, but I consider that Trump is a calamity and that if he were there for four
more years it would be an absolute calamity ", says Professor García. However,
" there is a state of opinion that fears that the result of these elections will be
complicated and that there will be challenges, so that the end result will be a
diabolical process of recount, county-by-county challenges, repetitions in certain
districts. .. a real madness that can last several months ", he warns, something
that," with this polarization trail, it is not known how it could end. "
" I am referring to the outbreak of armed conflicts; These people have weapons,
radical groups, some of them crazy and who can shoot themselves in a demonstration, doing
outrages as part of the institutional paralysis in which the country can be plunged
", he asserts.
This is how people, like those at SST, who lied about the real difference amongst
Democrats and Republicans in real effective changes of policy, shouting to the four winds
that "the Communists are coming", when they are not, and this way spread hatred and
division amongst the US society as if there was no tomorrow so that to conserve their "tax
cut", could end witnessing the total destruction of the US, not only as "Empire" ( a
process already in march before Corona-fear and 2020 electoral process, a construct of
decades of lying the electorate for the greed of a minority...), but also as a nation
state. All these people who, holding privileged insider knowledege of the funtioning of the
state as former insiders, should be held accountable for their willing and conscious
participation in the build up of the social and economic disastaer to come....
Forecast at the end of the article posted and quoted above:
The future: Institutional paralysis
··· An institutional paralysis like the one that can come
after 3-N "could already occur in 2000, in the elections between George Bush Jr. and Al
Gore, but the latter accepted the results even though they were open to challenge, and
that it avoided institutional collapse".
··· However, "now it does not seem that either of the two
candidates is going to have a gesture of these characteristics, with which, if doubts
already appear, it will not only be in the State, but the final collapse may be extremely
long and with unimaginable consequences ", indicates Professor García. "It seems
to me that the United States has a terrible situation ahead ", he sentenced.
A scene of Game of Thrones which could summarize 2020 US election campaign, that it
was based on throwing dirty to each other....But who has the real "power", not the
"government"?:
@ Posted by: Down South | Nov 1 2020 7:04 utc | 122
I understand the rationale behind Trump's policies. But my conclusion is exactly the
opposite: his attempt to stop the disintegration of the American Empire is accelerating the
disintegration of the American Empire, not averting it.
The key here is to understand that that's not how the American Empire should work.
The USA continues to deindustrialize at an accelerated pace under Trump; Wall Street was
never stronger than under Donald Trump; American debt was never higher. And now,
unemployment is as high as during the 1929 era.
The American Empire is the American Empire precisely because it doesn't need to
produce anything it needs except defense. It prints money in order to siphon wealth from
the rest of the world, enriching its economy while impoverishing the rest. That's the only
way the Empire can function - any other way will result in its destruction.
Trump's ideology will destroy the American Empire. It will collapse under a wave of
hyperinflation, skyrocketing unemployment, shortage of goods and collapsing economic
output.
The manufacturing sector saw 17,000 jobs added after four months of flat activity. This
followed a strong run of an average of 22,000 manufacturing jobs added every month in
2018 and 15,800 per month in 2017. Those gains followed two weak years that saw 7,000
manufacturing jobs lost in 2016 and only 5,800 per month added in 2015.
In the last 30 months of President Obama's term, manufacturing employment grew by
185,000 or 1.5%. In President Trump's first 30 months, manufacturers added 499,000 jobs,
expanding by 4.0%. In the same 30-month time span during the mature, post-recovery phase
of the business cycle, some 314,000 more manufacturing jobs were added under Trump than
under Obama, a 170% advantage
As Trump is going to win (provided the usual conditions pertain, fraud is not over the
normal levels, and the whole sh*t-story doesn't end up in the courts or fought out on the
streets, whereupon no reasoned predictions can be made), speculation about Biden as Prez.
is a waste of time.
The last part of the Pepe piece in b's post, which gives reasons to not vote Biden, my
take.:
Obama ran on Hopey-Changey and on his projected charm, actually glib con-man gab.
Worked wonderfully, imagine getting the Nobel Prize because you had a dead-beat Dad who was
from Kenya and you scored B+ for public speaking? Argh. (The real reason: killing will
continue, the status quo is preserved..)
Anyway, the ACA was a damp squib, it didn't solve anything, and depending on pov was in
effect a gift to Mega Insurance or was just 'lame' or as often, 'favored some over others'
etc.
Then the Financial Crisis hit. The Obama admin. didn't prevent it (one might argue they
couldn't not sure) and it didn't 'repair' as far as the ppl were concerned. Banks and Some
Big Cos were bailed out - millions of homeowners were tossed to the curb by Banks. Child
poverty, hunger, increased; wages weren't upped, health stats got worse No need to go on -
this provoked tremendous anger. The 2010 elections saw big R gains, 2014 they took the
Senate, iirc.
(Who cared about foreign parts like Ukraine, Syria? is what I'm saying.)
That Trump would win in 2016 was obvious as soon as he became a candidate. He was
the cartoon contrast of Obomber - white, fat, orange, tall, R vs. D, outspoken, strident,
clumsy (vs. the smooth-talking con), opinionated, stupid, and outrageous in a way. Click
bait and viewer bait for the MSM - but not for no reason.
DT's electoral promises were both opportunistic and more profound: like fire-brand
preachers of old, Build The Wall - MAGA - i.e. pledging a return to the past (see, again
the opposite of Barry, who hoped for the future) -- Stop the wars, undo past mistakes (Dems
don't run on anti-war..!), and, most important:
Drain the Swamp. The Deplorables are not ordinary ppl, but criminals in positions
of power. By putting this forward, Trump became a mirror of the ppl, part of them.
Imho, Trump's record (null or abysmal or whatever depending on pov) is not enough for
rejecting him in favor of loathed "failed" policies of the past - Clinton gang, Biden a
part of it, Obama, etc. (By US voters I mean.)
but see Kiza 8, gottlieb 63, dave 72, Jack, others, >> no difference.
...Bringing the supply chain back to the US and re-industrialising the US isn't going to
happen overnight or even in a couple of quarters. Just like the process to de-industrialise
didn't happen overnight. But that the process has started, it is undeniable, and will only
pick up pace when he wins a second term.
4 new Trafalgar polls came out for 10/29: Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Michigan. Trump
expanded his lead on Biden in Florida and Michigan vs. Trafalgar's earlier October
polls:
FL from +2.3% Trump to +2.7%
MI from +0.6% Trump to +2.5%
Trump did worse in Nevada and AZ: AZ from +4% Trump to +2.5%.
Nevada polled +2.3% Biden
Once again: the question is if Trump outperforms vs. MSM polls. If he repeats anywhere
near his 2016 - he will win.
Trump can only win again if the establishment/deep state is once again exceptionally
overconfident and asleep in the control room. They have numerous ways of swinging the
election at the last hour, from pre-hacked Diebold paperless voting machines to hanging
chads to simply having their operatives scattered around the nation throw ballots away and
fabricate the tallies. Oddly enough this extreme carelessness is still possible. The
establishment/deep state have not yet come to terms with what caused their plans to blow up
in 2016 and really do seriously believe that Russia had something to do with it, even
though they have no idea what Russia might have actually done to wreck their expected
electoral blowout by Clinton. They also think that part of the problem was that Trump
wasn't vilified harshly enough (they wanted the election to at least appear competitive),
and they think they have that covered this time around. It could be that the over-the-top
hysteria from the TDS victims has them overestimating the anti-Trump sentiment, though.
Still, the establishment/deep state screwing up exactly the same way twice in a row
doesn't seem likely. Even so, their profound incompetence continues to astonish, so maybe
we will once again get treated to the delightful spectacle of crowds of middle class faux
left dilettante snowflakes melting down.
It not hard to see why big pharma despises Trump. They stand to lose a lot of
money. My health stock investment has almost doubled during Trump's tenure.
vk @158 - Not acreage - but based (until Andrew Jackson, hardly any principled person's
prez) on PROPERTY VALUE. JUST as in the good ol' UK. Yep - despite NPR folks believing
otherwise (clealry never visited a history book) - the aristo controlled (in what way
really different?) Britain was actually a "democracy":, and was so from Magna Carta on...
Of course it was a, how to say, constrained, constricted "democracy," but then so was the
original one in Athens. Those who count as THE Demos - always been a matter for property
holder concern... So in GB - male, 21 and over and owning a property of a taxable (always
this, huh) value of a certain sum. Ensured that the hoi polloi males over 21 couldn't vote
- and for the exact same reasons, I do not doubt, as the intentions behind the Electoral
College construct by those less than admirable FFs. Gotta prevent the vast masses of the
population - the great unwashed, "the bewildered herd" in Hamilton's verbiage I do believe
- from having the ability to grab (well, they knew all about blood-letting theft of land,
after all, didn't they?) that sacred "property." (Sacred, surely 'cos owned by the
equivalent of the Murican aristos.)
@Down South #159
It shouldn't be surprising. Actual doctors and nurses are, by and large, really great
people. They don't want to turn away anyone.
The poorest in America can't afford health care - even the middle class can't really as
testified to by the millions of bankruptcies caused by medical expenses. Hospitals thus
were losing large sums of profit treating people who simply could not pay.
Obamacare threw many (not all) of those people onto health insurance company plans by
having the government pay the health insurance premium and then having the existing health
insurance customers pay via increased premiums - all this on top of the ongoing health care
profiteering. That's why Obamacare should really have been called "No Health Insurance
Company or Hospital Left Behind".
The existence of Obamacare also distracts people from the real problem: actual
affordable health care - which every other nation in the world except the US has, entirely
due to national health care.
I've posted this before - I will post it again.
In 2006, I left the semiconductor software industry on my own because I disagreed with
management decisions to outsource all jobs to India rather than change their fundamentally
flawed business model. Semiconductor software companies are the only part of the design
chain that charges by software license rather than per part made - this was great in the
early days of semiconductors but is a disaster when the industry consolidates to 5 large
multinational but US based companies.
In 2007, I experienced a retinal detachment right after my COBRA ended. I paid $35,000
in cash to get that fixed - including a 5 hour total elapsed journey through a hospital
which included a 1 hour surgical room occupancy and 1 hour of recovery time. In the door at
6:30 am and waiting for a taxi at 12:30 pm. The UCSF doctor that attended to me (and did a
great job to be clear) said his fee out of all that was $1200.
The following year, some cells stirred loose by the corrective surgery landed on my
now-attached retina and started reproducing. Instead of coughing up another $35K (or more),
I chose to fly to Australia, consult with the best eye doctor recommended by the Royal
Opthalmological Society of Australia and New Zealand.
That doctor's office was literally a light year more advanced than UCSF - supposedly one of
the premier teaching hospitals in the US. I pay him AU$5000 - US$4000 at the time, plus
another AU$800 for the hospital visit. The Sydney Eye Hospital gave me the choice of
staying a 2nd night (I stayed 1 night because I was at the end of the queue for the day, as
a foreigner), for free, including meals and medications administered on site.
I paid literally 1/7th the price in AU vs. the US - an Australia is not a 3rd world
country. The doctor got paid 3.5x in absolute terms. The service I received was immensely
better. Even including travel costs: flight plus 2 weeks in AU (which I was vacationing),
the overall cost was still 1/5th of my US experience.
That opened my eyes (literally) to just how fucked up the US system is.
@Don Bacon #165
Stock price doesn't bear any short term correlation with profits.
Just look at Tesla, Uber and what not.
Health care sector profits have increased disproportionately since Obamacare:
CFR report on health insurance company profits
Since ACA implementation on January 1, 2014, health insurance stocks outperformed the
S&P 500 by 106 percent.
You're right. The early liberals - specially from the American South - loved to compare
themselves with the Athenian Republic. The rationale is that the existence of slaves
enabled them to enjoy unparalleled freedom. Black slaves were frequently compared with
helots when the problem of slave revolts appeared (with the pro-abolitionists evoking the
figure of Spartacus). The South considered itself freer than the North in the USA - it was
only after their destruction in 1865 that the tide turned and the North became,
retrospectively, the paragon of liberal freedom.
In Europe, England was considered the ultimate free nation. Even American liberals
(including Benjamin Franklin) built up their legitimacy on being of English stock
(Anglo-Saxon race). With time, liberals begun to legitimize their hegemony with a worldwide
racial hierarchy - hence the definition of American democracy as Herrenvolk Democracy
("Master race democracy").
And yes, the original liberals considered the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as their birth
date - not the French Revolution of 1789 (which they condemned as illiberal, or "radical").
The founders of neoliberalism (Hayek, Mises, etc. etc.) put 1870 as the apex of liberalism,
which they tried to revive.
Escobar writes: "In contrast, two near-certain redeeming features would be the return of
the US to the JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal, which was Obama-Biden's only foreign policy
achievement"
Anyone who actually thinks this is either ignorant or moronic. Biden will absolutely
require Iran to limit their ballistic missiles before "rejoining" that then-altered deal.
Iran will never let this happen. Thus the deal is essentially dead [as far as US
involvement goes, which the other parties should ignore]. MOA notes this as well.
I don't know why though MOA refers to Escobar at all here though. The ignorance
demonstrated in the above quote should be enough to disqualify such a person from any
discussion about Biden, Iran, etc. and to also ignore anything else such a person claims.
You might as well quote a schizophrenic you meet down by the river for his take on Iran and
the JCPOA. Might as well learn sign language and ask the chimps at your local zoo what they
think about it.
You are not the only American who is doing it. They have even developed a term for it -
medical tourism:
With rising healthcare costs in the US and the rise of health tourism destinations that
offer quality and affordable healthcare perked up by a beautiful travel experience,
Americans are scampering to book appointments with healthcare providers far away from
home. Yearly, millions of patients travel from countries lacking healthcare
infrastructure or less advanced in a particular area of medical care to countries that
provide highly-specialized medical care.
Noirette @161: " Drain the Swamp. The Deplorables are not ordinary ppl, but
criminals in positions of power. By putting this forward, Trump became a mirror of the ppl,
part of them."
True enough, and as even the bunny claims, this was part of the act. But those who think
Trump's upset victory in 2016 was part of the plan need to offer up a better explanation
for why those criminals in positions of power would want to kneecap themselves with public
exposure. The rationale has to be extraordinarily critical and of huge value to the elites
because that price of exposure has been monumentally damaging to them.
Keep in mind that one of the most important (if not the most important) aspects
of US presidential elections is the "electoral mandate" . Far more important than
specific campaign promises is the general tone of the campaign. If a winning candidate had
campaigned on ending wars, bringing jobs back from abroad, and fighting corruption in
government, this isn't just an indication that the public wants something done about these
issues. First and foremost it forces an acknowledgement that these are indeed major issues
that the public wants to be part of the national discourse that the capitalist mass media
tries to control. Allowing these issues to become part of the national discourse is
diametrically opposed to the interests of the power elites. They do not want these issues
to even be discussed, much less addressed by the state.
So why would they intentionally force these issues into the forefront of national
discourse? That is, after all, what Trump's victory did, despite the establishment's best
efforts to distract with "Russia! Russia! Russia!" and "Racism, sexism and
pussy-grabbing, oh my!" . These issues were already smoldering below the surface due to
Sanders' campaign, so why would the elites want them fanned into flames?
Answer: They didn't. As much as the issues that the winner campaigns on getting elevated
in priority by the "electoral mandate" , the loser's issues get diminished. Trump
was supposed to lose, and lose bigly, and in the process the things he campaigned on were
supposed to be crushed down to objects of ridicule by the corporate mass media. Trump's
resounding defeat was supposed to signal that Americans rejected Trump's "conspiracy
theories" about some fictitious "deep state" that only existed in Trump's
imagination, burying the suspicions that the election fraud committed against Sanders
aroused. Trump being ignominiously trounced was supposed to allow the mass media to say
that Americans unequivocally voiced their opposition to ending war and their support for
intervention in Syria, clearing the way for Clinton's "no fly zone" . Trump being
utterly humiliated in the polls was supposed to decisively demoralize the
"deplorables" , convincing them with finality that there will never again be
good-paying blue collar jobs and that they are just disposable relics, while at the same
time crippling their resistance to the social engineering of "identity politics" ;
social engineering that I should point out is even more ill-conceived and incompetently
executed than the 737MAX MCAS system.
Trump was supposed to lose and take those issues with him to the dustbin of history.
It is important to understand this point because it clarifies who our enemies really are
and helps us to understand how they view the world.
Ancient Athens excluded from power slaves and resident foreigners (metics). Also women in
the families of male citizens, although one could argue that they had virtual
representation through the male citizens in their families. So also for the children in
citizens' families, although they would have full rights once they reached adulthood. The
adult male citizens who had full political rights were about 20 percent of the population
of Attica.
And even the poorest citizens had much more political power than average citizens of
today's so-called democracies have today. They could attend and vote in the Assembly, they
could be chosen by lot to serve in such bodies as the Council and juries, and to serve in
most offices. And for doing all these things there was pay, so that poor citizens had
particular motivation to participate, which they did. Just read Aristophanes. No wonder
most rich Athenians hated the system.
Again, you are mistaken. I am getting tired of correcting you.FoxNews drug their heels
when it came to supporting DJT in 2015 until it was clear that the majority of
conservatives actually wanted DJT as their candidate.
It was at that point that business-smartz kicked in and they had to acknowledge that
they must throw their weight behind the Trump ticket lest they prove themselves the
faux-conservative Rinos they actually were/are.
Business 101, my friend. You wanna keep the advert. revenue coming in, you produce
content your audience actually agrees with.
TBH and AFAIK Tucker Carlson is still the only truly sane conservative on FOx news. The
rest, including Hannity, don't neccessarily mind the endless wars so long as the public
endorses them. They are chameleons without an ethical lodestar guiding their
commentary.
Trump being utterly humiliated in the polls was supposed to decisively demoralize the
"deplorables", convincing them with finality that there will never again be good-paying
blue collar jobs and that they are just disposable relics,
_____________________________________________
The problem is you think the oligarchs are every bit as stupid as you are. It would be
nice if they were, but unfortunately they're not.
First of all lets examine who are these deplorables who you imagine were set up by the
oligarchs to be crushed and demoralized by running Trump as their candidate.
The deplorables are:
-The Americans that own the guns
-The Bible thumping American jihadist
-The Americans that sign up for the police and military and in those rolls operate the
states weaponry
-The Americans who believe the tree of liberty needs to be watered with the blood of
tyrants
I could go on but all you have to do is tune into the corporate mass media that caters
to the deplorables to find out who they are and what they are being sold.
But Mr Gruff is just too stupid to figure out why in the world the oligarchs might want
to not antagonize that segment of the population.
The oligarchs would have to have lost their frikken minds to hire trump for the purpose
of giving the deplorables a big "fuck you" as you imagine. The oligarchs are well aware
that they already gave a big fat finger to the deplorables when they engineered the
election of Obama (not to mention the 40 preceding years of marginalizing that segment of
the population) and just maybe it was time to pacify that segment of the population that
was growing larger and a bit restless.
But those who think Trump's upset victory in 2016 was part of the plan need to offer up a
better explanation for why those criminals in positions of power would want to kneecap
themselves with public exposure. The rationale has to be extraordinarily critical and of
huge value to the elites because that price of exposure has been monumentally damaging to
them.
Amen!!! I don't think that people who forward that narrative fully understand
how damaging this exposure has been to them.
By being exposed they have been shown to exist . This is super critical! No more
is talk of the deep state relegated to the lunatic fringe where they can be easily derided
as "conspiracy theorists"
Whether Trump can drain the swamp or not is to be seen but what is not in dispute is
that they exist.
Posted by: Down South | Nov 1 2020 18:31 utc |
181 How can the blob "return" when they never really left?
To pretend that Trump is some special Peacemaker, trying oh so hard to overcome deep
state resistance to rolling back empire, is Trumpism. Escobar is always there. Trump must
be understood as a leading creature of the swamp himself. Trying so hard just as Obama was
trying so hard.
The relative scores settled terribly are more a matter of opportunity than ruthless
efficiency. Though it is true that "success" requires dialing it back a bit, and having the
likes of Bolton around is a way of ensuring either that nothing gets done, or we all end up
ashes. Trump managed to axe Bolton on time, that time.
It's avoidance of those lower probability mega catastrophes that is the principle reason
of voting trump out with regards to foreign policy. And there are other reasons.
The globalist "Great Reset" wants to overcome the diverse rising obstacles to globalism's
perpetuation, especially the intensifying centrifugal political and economic forces which
directly oppose it or which hinder it. The global elites see politics as such, and any mode
of economy other than that which is strictly regimented and controlled by the US government,
the oligopoly MNCs and a handful of globalization entities, as antiquated obstructions to its
power and profit. From the point of view of the Earth and especially humanity it's essential
to obstruct the globalist-technocratic elite as much as possible.
So it follows that anything which sustains and multiplies the number of obstacles any
globalist actor has to traverse is a good thing, while anything that streamlines, unifies,
renders more "efficient" is bad. This includes the character of US foreign policy. Although
it will remain aggressively imperialist for as long as this government exists, it makes a
significant difference how disciplined and superficially "kinder and gentler" the facade is,
as opposed to how wayward, openly brutish and gratuitously insulting to everyone in the
world. Real anti-globalists always have known this, and the need never has been more critical
than now. From this point of view Trump is vastly preferable. The across-the-board hatred of
the elites for him is the best recommendation.
Trump's election was a monkey-wrench in the works, and although the elites were able to
make lemonade by turning anti-Trumpism into an organizing principle among the bewildered
masses, they certainly want to return to having a reliable, fully pliant figurehead in the
White House. With Biden/Harris they'd get the best of both worlds - they either get the
obedient Biden or the even more aggressively obedient Harris who would be all the more
controllable since she has no political support of her own and wouldn't have been elected
even if Biden became president and then had to be retired.
So it follows that gratuitous US imperial belligerence is in fact being "creatively
destructive", to use one of capitalism's own religious terms, in spite of the US empire's own
long-run goals and interests. The worst thing would be for US foreign policy to become less
Kaiser and more Bismarck. The more chaos the better. It may seem more painful in the short
run than running home to hide under adult mama's skirts the way almost all former
anti-imperialists, anti-globalists, "radicals", "leftists" have done, since they all were
frauds all along who can't take the slightest pain or hardship and would rather die than do
any movement-building work, but for the long run good of the Earth including humanity there's
no other option.
Obama actually surged 70,000 troops into Afghanistan, raising Bush's 30K to 100K+. That
got Mr Hope & Change the Nobel Peace Prize.
Obama got the Nobel Prize in 2009, the year he became president. The deadline for nominations
to the Nobel Committee is January 31 the same year. So either he did something
extraordinarily good between his inauguration January ~20 and January 31, or the prize was
awarded preemptively.
The Nobel Peace price committee resides in Oslo and consists of politically appointed
members, that is from parties of the Norwegian parliament (Stortinget). The chairman at the
time was Thorbjørn Jagland from the same Labour party as now chief NATO puppet Jens
Stoltenberg. Stoltenberg and Jagland were supposed rivals to become Prime Minister in 1996
after Gro Harlem "We have other methods" Brundtland who became WHO director (Hmmm...?).
Jagland is famous for being an imbecile foreign minister. He was once interviewed and
stated that Norway is a very important country in the world. His reasoning was that when
flying around and meeting people, he always saw a large number of Norwegian flags. I kid you
not.
Jagland is also famous for winning the battle against Jens Stoltenberg to become Prime
Minister in 1996. He then resigned one year later after winning the election in 1997,
because he had promised to resign if the labour party got fewer votes than 4 years earlier,
i.e. 36.9%. So he is forever the idiot Thorbjørn "36.9" Jagland, who gave away the
government position to the opposition after winning an election.
So this person was obviously qualified to become the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Peace
Prize Committee, he had shown that he could be made to do anything, including awarding the
Peace Prize preemptively to Obama and get his picture with Obama. Even Obama was
embarrassed.
"Obama got the Nobel Prize in 2009" This was part of the propaganda to normalize
permanent wars of imperial aggression as the new baseline for "peace". Just part of the
totalitarian "New Normal" the globalists led by the US government have been working
toward.
The ban against domestic propaganda that had been in place since shortly after WW2 was
repealed in 2013. It was known as the Smith-Mundt Act. As part of the repeal, NDAA authorized
a huge grant program for NGOs, think tanks, civil society and other experts outside
government who are engaged in "counter-propaganda" related work. Sounds like doublespeak for
censorship and support for "fake news." I hope Glenn will investigate and connect the dots
some day.
omg. I read the whole article...and I'm not really that smart.
Best line: " ...but in journalism, evidence is required before news outlets can validly
start blaming some foreign government for the release of information. And none has ever been
presented."
Four years ago I was railing against Hillary Clinton on Facebook without any
censoring.
Tonight I watched an interview Tucker Carlson did with Glenn Greenwald regarding the
Hunter Biden/Joe Biden scandal and Tucker showed a poll revealing that 51% of those polled
believe this scandal is "Russian Disinformation" with ZERO evidence.
Why do those being polled believe this? Because the bulk of the MSM they watch have told
them so and the major tech platforms have ALL censored the pertinent information so there is
NO debate amongst the electorate. All of this less than one week from our national
election.
With Facebook and Twitter and Google's and the bulk of the MSM's heavy fingers on the
scales of public information there are only two words to describe this:
ELECTION INTERFERENCE.
And this with over 70 million voters already having cast their ballots!
Regardless of the outcome next Tuesday, these tech/media corporations should ALL be
brought down at least to the point where they can never be allowed to interfere in another
American election again, regardless of the higher-ups personal political preferences.
And this is the system the war-mongering DNC wants to "spread around the world" with their
"regime change wars"?!
Stephanie, why do you want Trump gone? Trump is bait. His presence is resulting in many,
many bad actors revealing themselves to be nefarious. Just look at Twitter/Facebook censoring
this blockbuster news (along with the rest of the media). We, The People, are finally seeing
first had the level of tyranny that's upon us. None of it has anything to do with Trump. But
it's Trump's existence in the White House that is bringing it to light. Without him, we would
have never seen it for what it is. Think about that.
I may disagree with your take on CIA involvement, but the above paragraph couldn't be more
accurate. Trump's election was like throwing a brick through a rotten, wasp-infested
beehive.
I'll second that. Though perhaps to be fair to the original sentiment, perhaps the brick has
only knicked the beehive, and then smashed a window or two along it's way. He is arguably
inevitable, even desirable from some perspective, but the degree of nuisance is not erased, so
much as outweighed, by the necessity. We would be living in a better world, by definition, if
someone like him had never been required to improve it.
Agreed. I have been telling Democrats all they need do is run better candidates - and
virtually every time, I get people trying to claim there was never anything wrong with Hillary
or Joe and also Trump is Literally Hitler Incarnate.
I grew up watching psychos in the Extreme Right talk that way about whoever THEY didn't like
politically. Arguing that Bill Clinton was going to send Janet Reno to take their guns and cart
them off to FEMA camps like a scene out of "Red Dawn" or something. But this isn't the fringes
talking anymore. It's the mainstream, and it's on the Left.
Glen, I just paid for a subscription so that I can say this one FACT. The PODESTA EMAILS
WERE NOT THE RESULT OF A HACK.
Please stop reporting this nonsense. The cover story was all part of the plan (approved by
HRC) to shift attention to a Trump-Russia collusion narrative that has always been fiction.
Guccifer 2.0 was created out of this same scheme. The meta data on the files prove that it's
impossible that those emails were hacked, they had to be downloaded on a local device
(thumbdrive most likely).
The FISA Abuse, the spying on Trump, The plan to implicate collusion, the Flynn frameup,
the Impeachment, The Mueller investigation were not the base crimes, those were all part of a
cover up. By you insinuating that the DNC server got hacked (which there is zero evidence
for), you are wittingly or unwittingly complicit in perpetuating the lie that it was. You're
missing a much, much bigger story here. The biden laptop isn't even the tip of the icebeg
here.
Ask yourself this; "Why would dozens of high level DOJ, FBI, CIA and Whitehouse officials
in the Obama Administration put their careers on the line and commit literally hundreds of
felonies all in an effort to obstruct/neutralize Trump?" That is first question any true
journo should be asking right now.
You mention in this article that the media is basically over-compensating for helping Trump
win in 2016. That is extremely naive on your part. The media/twitter/facebook/CNN/MSNBC, etc.
is too well orchestrated, too well coordinated to be operating even vaguely independently. This
is project Mockingbird happening on a scale almost unimaginable. Maybe even the Intercept was
intercepted. Why would the publication that you founded not allow you to publish this? If you
look back at 2016, the entire media industrial complex was just as coordinated as it is now,
they just got sloppy because they were certain Trump wasn't going to win. Who's being naive now
Kay?
I also get frustrated with what I see as a naive interpretation, by figures like Dan
Bongino, Tim Pool, etc. I wonder if there is a fear by some to point behind the curtain, that
they will be attacked and cancelled for "conspiracy theories."
Neither Tim or Dan are really journalists and besides, this story is so massive and so
incomprehensibly large in scope/scale/magnitude that we shouldn't get too frustrated.
The main point to remember here is that none of this has anything to do with Trump. Look at
the timeline in its entirety, the best we are able to do and then plot a graph of the Media
Industrial Complex's behavior. They were out to derail Trump from the moment he came down the
escalator and it's not because he's a womanizer or that he's a game show host. They couldn't
afford to have an non-establishment player come in and wreck their plans. The question is, what
the f#$% were their plans? Why did they risk so much to keep him out of the WH?
My view is that the constant sturm und drang about the corruption of the elections (voter
suppression, mail fraud, ballot harvesting, etc, etc) is a ploy to distract from the fact that
the real corruption already happened long before the election.
The real corruption is even mentioned by Glenn in his draft: the SELECTION process.
The media do what they're told, and what they are doing is keeping up the drumbeat of
election corruption. In other words, they've been told to distract all attention from the real
story.
The real story is that, to the people who control candidate selection, IT DOESN'T MATTER WHO
WINS.
That is the whole point of controlling the selection process. Oh yes, I know the media hates
Trump and so do the establishment. Really? The same establishment that just benefitted from the
greatest upward transfer of wealth in human history, during a pandemic panic, under Trump?
Bezos has gained over 70 billion in net worth this year, under Trump. You think he hates Trump?
Really?
You think Biden will do less? Or perhaps you think he would do more than the greatest upward
transfer of wealth in human history?
Republicans versus Democrats is a con game. It's a kabuki theatre of manipulation of
parochial tribalism, a Punch n Judy Show for the rubes.
As was once mentioned in the UT threads at Salon, isn't it time for a second political
party, Mr Greenwald?
It's not about their plans. It's just a non-violent (so far) class war. Trump is a vessel
for the working classes to carry their dissatisfaction of elite leadership. It's easier to
communicate directly to the people now due to social media, so the traditional media can't tell
the people how to vote (can't declare a candidate to be beyond the pale any more, squashing
their chances, and they used to have that power). The media are part of the elite leadership,
they don't like the working classes not listening to them, and they don't like the loss of
power. That's their agenda.
They have taken to "any means necessary" to keep that power, even though now it's basically
lying and obfuscation. They are trading off their legacy trustworthiness for short term
benefit, but they are destroying that foundation of trust as well. That happens slowly but
surely as more people see through them. Takes too long in the experience of everyone who is
reading this, because we're well ahead of the curve. The average mid level elite is a working
professional with kids too busy and not interested enough to dig to the next level and has been
taking their word - but they too see the truth every time they really look and over time that
is going to go as we all hope it will. It's just going to take a while.
"The guy who co-founded one of the current-day major online journalism outlets isn't really
a journalist" - Someone Posting to the Comments on an Article by a Guy Who Co-Founded One of
the Current-Day Major Online Journalism Outlets
There is good cause to question the Snowden story. He was CIA. Once a CIA agent, always a
CIA agent. It's plausible that he was inserted into booz allen hamilton in an attempt to harm
the NSA (on behalf of the CIA). Tell me this Glen, how did Snowden evade the largest
dragnet/manhunt ever on the planet to evade the authorities and make it to Moscow? Am I the
only one who finds this a little fishy? As someone who has been in software for 40 years, when
I heard him on Joe Rogan podcast about a year ago, I didn't find his backstory credible at all.
He sounds intelligent, but when you get beyond that and listen to him from a technological
perspective, his story doesn't add up. I find it hard to believe.
Why would a "patriot" doing work on behalf of the CIA be thrown to the wolves? Why wouldn't
they cover for him after it was released? I haven't been in software for 40 years, but I
believe that the Snowden story is extremely credible.
Snowden was a libertarian high school dropout hacker
The Deep State hired 800,000 employees/contractors around the Beltway after 9/11 on a war
footing, so anyone that was seen as clean and patriotic may not have needed a lot of standard
credentials by the usual bureaucratic managerial idiot types working for the Feds
I've been told that military field grade IT is all from the 1990s, dunno about national
security agencies, but unless you have actually worked with national security IT stuff I'm not
sure why your views should hold much weight
Senior people I know in the military and national security apparatus have told me that
corruption, waste and inefficiency are rampant (80-90%?)
Sorry, but I've heard that "anything CIA is automatically X" way too many times in my life.
Often from people trying to sell books about how we never landed on the Moon (you'd be amazed
how many ex-[alphabet agency] agents "back up" these claims with the worst sort of
pseudo-authoritative malarkey).
Hah! They "helped" Trump by running two billion dollars' worth of 95% negative coverage. It
made Trump look like the victim of a massive smear campaign by partisan hacks. What have they
been doing to "over-compensate", exactly? Make it 99%?
Whether or not they helped Trump, Greenwald's article claimst that journalists feel
responsible for Trump being elected last time so they are trying not to make the same
'mistake'. At least that's what Glenn is asserting here.
They're not wrong. They helped elect him with their sheer negativity. I've seen these people
argue the point, and they always point the finger at other journalists somehow NOT being
negative enough. It's never themselves.
So there's no collective soul-searching going on, no self-awareness, only a drive to be
angrier and finger-wagging with less concern for the actual facts of any given matter. They
don't realize how transparent it's become for those not already personally invested in the
extant narratives.
This, I think, is why we are seeing many more people defect to Trump rather than away from
him; when one is personally and deeply invested in a narrative, it's an article of faith.
Imagine you walk into church one day and the pastor says "this just in: the Archangel Gabriel
was a child molestor who felt up Baby Jesus". Next week, they accuse the Virgin Mary of the
same. Would a member of the faithful just roll with that, or consider moving to another church
altogether just to avoid the emotional whiplash?
More to the point, the head of Crowdstrike, the company run by a known Russia-hater the
Democrats sent their server to instead of the FBI, and who never provided that server to the
FBI, admitted in a Senate hearing that there was, in fact, no evidence of hacking. He was under
oath that time. Russiagate remains one of the most successful propaganda campaign in
history.
Just before or just after Trump's 2016 election I was in a Manhattan restaurant with my
domestic partner talking with strangers from DC. It turned out that they worked in the State
Dept. and they told us that since Trump questioned the veracity of some things the intelligence
establishment had said, they would absolutely bring him down. We were shocked but have
remembered this throughout the FISA debacle,the Mueller mess,the impeachment and this election
cycle.
Right. Thank you. I wrote to Matt T. about this same issue in his article. I'm hoping they
will do the investigation required for them to amend their articles. It really is a fundamental
mistake to perpetuate this propaganda.
It's literally in the Mueller report that the DNC server was hacked, without a shred of
evidence. As Fox Mulder said "Trust No One". Matt & Glen really need to get to the point
where they chuck everything they think they know and start over. Everything has been a lie. Why
would anyone believe ANYTHING the FBI or DOJ of Obama WH put out at this point? The MSM has no
credibility, FBI/DOJ/CIA? This cancer has metasticized to the point where the patient is on
life support.
We need to understand that Trump is Chemo. It takes an outsider to come in, someone who
didn't need this job, someone who couldn't be bought, to come in and kill that cancer.
Just to offer some confirmation for that, Here is a CNN article from the time: "A phishing
email sent to Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta may have been so sophisticated
that it fooled the campaign's own IT staffers, who at one point advised him it was a legitimate
warning to change his password."
However, they also report that the link was from " [email protected] ." I searched
for whether that email address had been reported as malicious on the day that the story broke.
Far from being "sophisticated", it was just a phishing link that was going around randomly, and
had already been reported to this spam reporting site:
So, despite (much of) the media converging on a "sophisticated spear phishing" narrative,
this looks to be a link that was sent to a large number of people over a long period, and just
a case of random spam phishing that got lucky.
re: "so sophisticated that it fooled the campaign's own IT staffers"
I'm not a google mail user, but in general it is pretty rare for a phishing email to NOT
have extended headers (server route log) that reveal a bogus or weird looking origin.
"Alleging" would be more accurate. They've been acting quite more brazenly as a
misinfo/disinfo arm of the DNC. Whether or not the DNC has deep enough connections with the CIA
to provide a useful and reliable data/policy bridge is another question, but both DNC and GOP
likely have enough connections to establish semi-functional "lamprey" networks just due to
their longevity and resulting personal/professional contacts therein.
Hi Frank. " The PODESTA EMAILS WERE NOT THE RESULT OF A HACK.
Please stop reporting this nonsense. The cover story was all part of the plan (approved by
HRC) to shift attention to a Trump-Russia collusion narrative that has always been fiction.
Guccifer 2.0 was created out of this same scheme. The meta data on the files prove that it's
impossible that those emails were hacked, they had to be downloaded on a local device
(thumbdrive most likely)."
Based on the forensics that was my conclusion but beware of these rabbit holes. It has never
been discussed that those details can also be faked (the meta data.) Certainly Gucifer which
seemed like damage control. I am unsure of the claims about his being backtracked tho.
So it's possible that the evidence is faked having accepted the conclusions of VIPS
analysts.
Could be. It would also mean that it was the first time Wikileaks published something that
wasn't authentic. Assange knows where the emails came from and he asserted that they didn't
come from Russia.
Note to all: You must use actual (historical) ISP speeds as of the specific months in
question. They increased a good deal in the months that followed in that area.
I agree that there was a massive fake Russia story created by GPS Fusion, the Clinton
campaign, Clinton allies, with the help of US intelligence, often willing and sometimes just
incompetent.
But there is definitely some evidence of a DNC hack. Among other things, the Dutch
intelligence services seem to have observed evidence in their spying on the Internet Research
Agency - reported by mutliple sources including Dutch media. What the nature of the hack was
and how it gibes with the evidence that there must have been a person on the ground to transfer
the data files that fast is of course fair to discuss.
There is also evidence, both purposely forgotten in media coverage after Jan 2017, of an
attempted RNC hack and the overt public hack and release of Colin Powell's email to embarass
and hurt Trump. There is plenty of other evidence of Internet Research Agency activity that was
pro-BLM and anti-Trump, making their more likely overall goal the sowing of chaos than only
supporting Trump. Thus the need for GPS/Clintonistas/Intelligence/Mueller's team to spin a
narrative.
I became a fan of yours when I was in law school at UC Hastings in 2003. Your the best, for
sure. But fuck...
I got to be honest...I'm glad the press is ignoring this story. There's just too much at
stake. Biden might be losing his edge, his family might be trading in his name, but who gives a
shit? The alternative is worse by light years.
And yeah, I don't trust the "people" out there to get it right. The "people" are rubes.
Those idiots voted for this piece of shit once before, they'll do it again, in a heartbeat.
More importantly, you really want to do Rudy Giuliani's work for him? I don't know, I don't
get it...why so eager to make the campaign's case for them? It's not a rhetorical question. I
just don't get it.
Alex: you are saying that we should not have independent press, that the media ought to be
agents of propaganda, consciously decieving the public for the greater good.
Maybe Biden is the lesser evil in this election. But without actual journalists like Glenn
we could never know.
I get the frustrations over Trump. He is a disaster. But the answer to that disaster does
not concist in advocating for more lies and propaganda.
I have yet to hear a reasonable case for Trump being either the greater evil or a disaster.
Many of the allegations against Trump have remained that - allegations - but in Biden's case
some of the same accusations (particular about racism) is in his Senate record. He was a
terrible candidate to position against Trump, and he picked as his veep the only person in the
entire primary season to get blown out by a single phrase from Tulsi Gabbard - who the rest of
the party's establishment absolutely despised because Hillary said so.
With Trump? Roaring economy brought to a halt not even by coronavirus, but massive economic
lockdowns that break the economy down to virtually Blue-State (down) / Red-State (up)
comparisons. Democrats were accusing Trump of "meddling" when he was still a candidate and
nonetheless pressured a Detroit factory into staying in the US. The man understands economic
leverage, and to ignore or deny that is like denying the Sun heats the Earth.
Three Middle East peace deals leading to an equal number of Nobel nominations. He is roasted
for de-escalating international tensions, lauded only when he fires missiles at nations
Democrats think need shooting at, and then castigated for killing a terrorist leader in the
same nation they were cheering him for firing missiles at.
I see very little criticism of Trump that isn't associated with bald-faced party-based
opposition, from establishment Republicans who hated his cockblocking of JEB BUSH FOR GODSAKE
to Democrats who still think Hillary's shit job as Secretary of State (ruining more nations
than Trump has cut peace deals for) is beyond reproach.
Speaking as a lifetime independent, please: the naked, incessant and baseless fury
demonstrated by Democrats and the Radical Left since 2016 has NOT been a selling point for
us.
Biden has been credibly accused of actually pinning a staffer against the wall and stuffing
his fingers up her vagina. The media didn't attack her story, but her college credentials, and
dumped the story after.
Biden has actually authored racist legislation and in recent years spoke of "being able to
work across the aisle" - with racist segregationists.
Trump's been merely ACCUSED of a shit-ton of things. But I don't join lynch-mobs. Same
reason the lynching of Justice Kavanaugh (seriously, you guys went after him over "I like beer"
and school calendars you had to try and reinterpret as codebooks?) made me see the Democratic
Party as a progressively more lunatic outfit. Reducing impeachment to "who needs criminal
charges? we really just hate the guy" wasn't a winner with us independents either, not just
speaking for myself there.
A pox on both your damned parties, and thank Trump for being that pox.
Gee Alex, elitist much? You don't like Trump so the people making an informed choice is not
a worthy goal? Anyone who disagrees with your world view is a rube who is not smart enough to
see the light - as defined by you? And you wonder why Trump won last time. The left is
populated by arrogant asses who think because they came out of college with a degree in some
worthless major, they are smarter than everyone else. Well, I went to college to but got a
degree in engineering vice sociology but I guess I'm just an educated rube.
Your law school tuition dollars were clearly wasted. Most of the people/rubes/idiots I know
and love learned the difference between "your" and "you're" in high school - and acquired
critical thinking skills at the same time. Too bad you missed out.
Yeah, we the people (rubes) are fn sick of the fn lawyers (especially from UC Hastings)
being in political control of our country and want a non-political person to clean up. What's
so hard for you to understand?
How's your guy doing you fucking rube? Great choice! Job well done!! If you ever wonder why
nobody gives a shit about your opinion, the fact that you chose a fucking reality star who ran
every business he ever owned into the ground, and fancies a bizarre hairdo, that's why no one
cares what you say. You're fucking stupid.
bahahahahaha...go crawl back into your fucking prol shit hole dwelling and latch onto
Tucker's teat. You're a fucking joke and always will be, no matter how special your dear leader
makes you feel.
Our local sanitation workers are much more thoughtful and respectful actually. I am voting
for Biden but I find this lawyer's response detestable. We need to grow up and stop with ad
hominem attacks that do nothing to advance the discussion.
Morals and ethics obviously mean nothing to a lawyer. If this was Don Jr, you would be out
for blood. As an independent voter, I want to know that I'm not voting for a piece of shit that
has been compromised by the Russians and Chinese! People like you, the FAKE NEWS media, and
antifa, etc are a major reason why I won't ever give my vote to Biden!
Elitists like Alex G. made the election of Donald Trump as president both inevitable and
necessary. The more he disses the "people" aka "rubes," the more President Trump's re-election
becomes equally inevitable and necessary. To borrow from Sen. Ted Cruz's exchange with Twitter
CEO Jack Dorsey, "Who the hell made Alex G. the final authority on how and what people should
think, say and do?"
One thing we know for sure is Alex G. never learned any humility or manners growing up. To
substantiate this, he stands condemned out of his own mouth. Last thing this country needs is
to have an authoritarian demagogue like him anywhere near the levers of power.
Please go back and fact check the old stories that made us hate Trump in the first place.
They've proven to be lies. He isn't perfect, but Biden will destroy this country. He's beyond
corrupt. Go look at the source materials.
Arrogant, smug D party loyalist goons and assholes like you are a very large part of why
people voted for Trump in 2016 and will vote for him in this election. T-R-0-L-L
I believe in the democratic system. The people may make mistakes, but so can anyone else. An
average of all the people is more accurate than randomly picking subsets of people to make
decisions. You say that you and your friends are not a random subset, you are better than
average. Your opponents say the same thing. We have a system for resolving these disputes.
Maybe you can invent a better one, but "I'm right and my opponents are wrong" is not a new
approach.
In answer to your "Why" question, perhaps Mr. Greenwald believes the same thing.
Glenn - new subscriber today (saw you with Tucker Carlson). As a conservative voter, I
support your new venture, not because your story is critical or suspicious of Biden, but
because we need more talented journalists willing to just investigate possible corruption and
inform the public. I also support Matt Taibbi for the same reason. The last line of your
article sums it up best for me.
"The whole point is that the press loses its way when it cares more about who benefits from
information than whether it's true."
Good luck, I hope you find this new path rewarding professionally and financially.
Agreed, I also like reading Quillette for it's equal publication of articles (they printed
that big article from the Environmentalist who demonized Environmentalism after he was banned
from his original publisher), and I also like reading Sharyl Attkisson as well.
I find it interesting how Glenn sees all the propoganda from these agencies in the media,
but fails to see the full extent of it in social media and therefore is unable to report on it
adequately. The DNC server hack is more of the same.
I paid for a subscription precisely because I believe that, despite what you may or may not
personally believe, you don't allow it to influence your pursuit of the truth. I want the truth
- nothing less and nothing more.
I just signed up, too, for that very reason. When those in positions of power put on a mask
and practice deception, they must be exposed. Sunlight is the cure for the disease of
corruption.
Personally, having read your work going back to Cato Institute and Volokh, I'm happy you're
independent and I can directly fund you. I'm willing to throw even more money at your projects.
Consider crowdfunding video documentary teams and other large projects. Your following after
all of this is going to be as large as ever.
I've supported him here as well because I think he is an important voice right now. There
are few journos out there right now who have Glenn's credibility who are willing to take on
media groupthink. But it is a tough environment. With NYT offering their digital for 4$ a month
that gives access to all of their writers/content, it is very difficult for writers like Glenn
to compete.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee confirmed Wednesday the
information exposed by former Hunter
Biden business associate
Tony Bobulinski that connects the former Vice President to companies and ventures in China.
But you wouldn't know it by following the main stream press.
Bobulinski's bombshell interview with Fox News host
Tucker Carlson Tuesday, along with Carlson's follow up exclusive on Wednesday, revealed
that Democratic candidate Joe Biden was aware of his son's business questionable overseas
business dealings. It should be a huge story. After all, Joe Biden has publicly denied knowing
about his son's business ventures in China, Ukraine and other parts of the world.
So why isn't this story on the front page of every newspaper and covered by every cable
network?
How is it possible that the majority of main stream media outlets, newspapers and cable
networks had no problem running unsubstantiated stories about President Donald Trump, his
family and his businesses only to find out later – without corrections- that the
information they published was bogus.
Here, there is an eye witness to the Biden family operations: Bobulinski. He has come
forward and shown his credibility. He has verified documents, photos, receipts from Hunter
Biden's hard drive that the FBI had obtained, along with President Trump's friend and personal
lawyer former New York City Mayor Rudy
Giuliani.
Why hasn't the FBI done anything with this before the election? The bureau has had it for
almost a year. Giuliani then did the only thing he could do – he turned over the
documents to The New York Post. Those documents obtained from Hunter Biden's laptop are the
massive breadcrumbs to a real political scandal.
These documents raise serious questions as to whether or not our possible future president
really is compromised by foreign adversaries, or whether or not he was using his position in
government to profit his family.
Still, it's only crickets from the main stream media. At the same time, big tech giants like
Twitter, Google and Facebook are also working diligently to squash the story and keep the truth
from the American people.
Tucker Carlson had the highest ratings – historic ratings – at Fox News Tuesday
night with more than 7 million viewers tuning in for the Bobulinski story. Yet, the Bobulinski
interview wasn't trending on Twitter, and in fact, it appeared that his story was non-existent
on the other networks.
Not even the Senators, who held a hearing on Wednesday, could get a straight answer from
Twitter's CEO
Jack Dorsey on why his platform banned The New York Post stories.
Sen. Ted Cruz said on Twitter "What @Jack told the Senate, under oath, is false."
"I just tried to tweet the @nypost story alleging
Biden's CCP corruption. Still Blocked."
Censorship in full force. However, this is not like the old
Soviet censorship – this is a bizarre new self-censorship by elitist leftists who
believe they know what's best for the American people.
Think about this – what if this story was about information these news agencies
discovered on Donald Trump Jr. or Eric Trump. How would they treat it?
Let's start with the most widely discussed and central to the issue of alleged corruption
was Hunter Biden's paid position on the board of Ukrainian energy giant Burisma Holdings.
Despite the fact Hunter Biden had no background in energy he was being paid more than $50,000 a
month and in some instances as much as $83,000 a month.
What about the most concerning connection for the Biden's with China's CEFC, an energy giant
that is compared to Goldman Sachs. It is directly connected to the Chinese Communist Party and
according to Bobulinski, as well as senior lawmakers investigating, possible used as leverage
against the Bidens by the communist government.
"Joe Biden and the Biden family are compromised" said Bobulinski in Tuesday night's hour
long interview with Carlson. He said he turned over evidence to the FBI and openly spoke about
his alleged meetings with then Vice President Joe Biden. Biden is referred to by his son Hunter
Biden in emails obtained by the FBI and first published by The New York Post as the 'Big Guy'
and or 'the Chairman.'
Bobulinski revealed that he "held a top-secret clearance from the NSA and the DOE. I served
this country for four years in one of the most elite environments in the world, the Naval
Nuclear Power Training Command, and to have a congressmen out there speaking about Russian
disinformation or Joe Biden at a public debate referencing Russian disinformation when he knows
he sat face-to-face with me, I traveled around the world with his son and his brother. To say
that and associate that with my name is absolutely disgusting to me ."
Joe Biden, however, has publicly denied having any financial gain from his son's, Hunter,
business ventures. He said at the second Presidential debate, "I have not taken a penny from
any foreign source ever in my life." However, Biden has refused to answer any questions
regarding the allegations or address some of the accusations against him or his son.
The American public has the right to know if their next president has been compromised by
their families business dealings with the communist Chinese. Moreover, many of the business
ventures his son was connected with were during his tenure as Vice President.
Our nation has been divided but not by President Trump. It's been divided by an army of
bureaucrats, liberal elites, the New Democratic socialists, special interests and more
importantly a biased partisan media.
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For now, Americans will be left in the dark. On Wednesday committee Chairman Sen. Ron
Johnson, R- WI, told The Daily Caller, that Bobulinski will not be called to testify before the
Nov. 3 elections. He said the committee is working to review all the information that has been
provided to the committee by Bobulinski.
The information has to be verified, as it is subject to the same false information to
Congress laws that verbal or written testimony does.
However, a Johnson spokesperson told the Caller that all the material provided by Bobulinski
to the committee is legitimate and verified .
The committee has "also" not come across any "signs" or evidence to suggest the content
Hunter Biden and Bobulinksi content is false , the spokesperson added.
It's tragic to think that if by chance – a small remote chance – that Biden
actually wins the election justice will never be served and our nation will fundamentally
change.
America will be at a crossroads on November 3. The main stream media is doing its part to
ensure that the American people are not informed, so it is up to you to vote your conscience
and seek out the truth.
Col. Leghorn CSA , 9 hours ago
I suggest enabling RICO charges against any media that conspires to hide the truth.
UPS has found
documents that went missing in transit to Tucker Carlson, putting to rest questions about the
whereabouts of a trove that the Fox News host had called "damning" of presidential candidate
Joe Biden's family.
"After an extensive search, we have found the contents of the package and are arranging
for its return," a UPS spokesman told the
Daily Beast on Thursday. "UPS will always focus first on our customers and will never
stop working to solve issues and make things right."
While the successful search resolved the issue of the documents' whereabouts, questions
remain about how they disappeared from a package sent to Carlson in California from a producer
in New York -- and who, if anyone, was behind it. Without naming the company involved or
specifically saying the papers were purposely targeted and stolen, Carlson suggested on his
show on Wednesday night that the disappearance wasn't coincidental.
"As of tonight, the [shipping] company has no idea and no working theory even about what
happened to this trove of material – documents that are directly relevant to the
presidential campaign just six days from now," Carlson said. The company's executives
"seemed baffled and deeply bothered by this, and so are we."
Carlson described the package as containing confidential documents about the Biden family
and said they were "authentic, real and damning." He said he asked a Fox producer in New
York to send the documents to him in Los Angeles, where he had traveled to interview former
Biden business associated
Tony Bobulinski on Tuesday. The package didn't show up on Tuesday morning, prompting UPS to
begin an exhaustive search.
Mainstream media critics mocked Carlson for saying the documents had disappeared, including
some who suggested that they never existed. HuffPost said Carlson "concocted yet another
conspiracy
theory " to explain the disappearance of documents related to what they called his
"conspiracy theory" about Biden's son, Hunter.
Carlson devoted his entire show on Tuesday night to the Bobulinski interview, which provided
more specific allegations about the Biden family's business dealings in China following an Oct.
14
New York Post report on the ventures. Although Bobulinski provided legal documents, text
messages and recordings to back up his claims, the interview was largely ignored by other
mainstream media outlets.
Whether or not this is Donald Trump's last year as president, the near-certainty of new
episodes of reckless overreach by American foreign policymakers means that this is not the last
the country has seen of his America First policy.
Tuesday night, we heard at length and on camera from one of the Biden family's former
business partners. His name is Tony Bobulinski. He's a very successful businessman and a Navy
veteran.
Bobulinski spoke to "Tucker Carlson Tonight" for a full hour. He told us he met two
separate times with Joe Biden himself. Not just with Joe
Biden's son or his brother, but with Joe Biden -- the former vice president and the man now
running for president -- to discuss business deals with the communist government of China .
That's a very serious claim, and whatever your political views, it's hard to dismiss it when
Tony Bobulinski makes it because Bobulinsky is an unusually credible witness. He's not a
partisan, he's not seeking money, he's not seeking publicity. He did not want to come on our
show.
But when Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and the Biden campaign accused Tony Bobulinski of
participating in a Russian disinformation effort, he felt he had no choice. That was a slander
against him and against his family. So Bobulinski came to us. He arrived with heaps of evidence
to bolster the story he was telling. He brought contemporaneous audio recordings, text
messages, e-mails, many financial documents.
By the end of the hour, it was very clear to us that Tony Bobulinski was telling the truth
and that Joe Biden was lying. We believe that any honest person who watched the entire hour
would come to the same conclusion.
Well, on Wednesday, a
Senate committee confirmed it . The Senate Homeland Security Committee reported that all of
Tony Bobulinski's documents are, in fact, real. They are authentic. They are not forgeries.
This is not Russian disinformation. It is real.
Bobulinski told a remarkable story. Joe Biden -- who, once again, could be president of the
United States next week, was planning business deals with America's most formidable global
opponent. And when he was caught doing it, Joe Biden lied. And then he went further. He
slandered an innocent man as a traitor to his own country. It is clear that Joe Biden did that.
That's not a partisan talking point uttered in bad faith on behalf of another presidential
campaign. It's true.
So the question is, what is Joe Biden's excuse for doing that? What is his version of this
story? Everyone has a version and we'd like to hear it, but we don't know what Joe Biden's
version of the story is, because no one in America's vast media landscape has pressed Joe Biden
to answer the question. Instead, reporters at all levels and their editors and their publishers
have openly collaborated with Joe Biden's political campaign. That is unprecedented. It has
never happened in American history.
Wednesday morning, the big papers completely ignored what Tony Bobulinski had to say. So did
the other television networks. Not a single word about Bobulinski appeared on CNN or anywhere
else. Newsweek decided to cover it, but came to the conclusion that the real story was about
QAnon somehow. This is Soviet-style suppression of information about a legitimate news story.
Days before an election, the ramifications of it are impossible to imagine. But we do know the
media cannot continue in the way that it has.
No one believes the media anymore and no one should. You should be offended by this, not
because the media are liberal, but because this is an attack on our democracy. You've heard
that phrase again and again, but this is what it looks like. In a self-governing country,
voters have a right -- an obligation -- to know who they're voting for. In this case, they have
the right to know the Democratic nominee for president was a willing partner in his family's
lucrative influence-peddling operation, an operation that went on for decades and stretched
from China and Ukraine all the way to Oman, Romania, Luxembourg and many other countries. This
is not speculation once again, and it's not a partisan attack. It's true, and Tony bobulinski
confirmed it.
Bobulinski met with Joe Biden at a hotel bar in Los Angeles in early May of 2017, and when
he did, Joe Biden's son introduced Bobulinski this way: "Dad. Here's the individual I told you
about that's helping us with the business that we're working on and the Chinese."
Now, written documents confirmed this is real. At one point, Joe Biden's son texted Tony
Bobulinski to say that Joe Biden, his father, was making key decisions about their business
deals with China.
CARLSON: When Hunter Biden said his chairman, he was talking about his dad.
BOBULINSKI: Correct, and what Hunter is referencing there is, he spoke with his father
and his father is giving an emphatic 'no' to the ask that I had, which was putting proper
governance in place around Oneida Holdings.
CARLSON: So, Joe Biden is vetoing your plan for putting stricter governance in the
company. I mean, and it's it's right here in the email.
BOBULINSKI: Yes, Tucker, I want to be very careful in front of the American people. That
is not me writing that. That is not me claiming that. That is Hunter Biden writing on his own
phone. Typing in that 'I spoke with my chairman,' referencing his father.
All this is spelled out in the clearest possible language in documents that Bobulinski
provided us, documents that subsequently federal authorities have authenticated as real.
On May 13, 2017, for example, Hunter Biden got an email explaining how his family would be
paid for their deal with the Chinese energy company. His father, Joe Biden, was getting
10%.
BOBULINSKI: In that email, there's a statement where they go through the equity, Jim Biden's
referenced as, you know, 10%. It doesn't say Biden, it says Jim. And then it has 10% for the
big guy held by H. I 1,000% sit here and know that the big guy is referencing Joe Biden. It's,
that's crystal clear to me because I lived it. I met with the former vice president in person
multiple times.
That was three years ago, and we still don't know where all that money went, because the
media haven't forced Joe Biden to tell us. But Tony, Bobulinski did add a telling detail. Joe
Biden's brother, Jim, saw his stake in the deal double from 10% to 20%. Was Jim Biden getting
his brother's share again? It might be worth finding out.
We also know that according to an email from a top Chinese official, this one written on
July 26, 2017, the Chinese proposed a $5 million dollar interest-free loan to the Biden family,
"based on their trust on [sic] BD [Biden] family." The e-mail continued, "Should this Chinese
company, CEFC, keep lending more to the family?" And indeed, CEFC was supposed to send another
$5 million dollars to the Bidens' business ventures. Apparently, that money never made it to
the business. Where did it go? A recent Senate report suggests it went to Hunter Biden
directly. And from there, who knows? Again, no one's asked.
Tony Bobulinski also told us he learned Hunter Biden became the personal attorney to the
chairman of CEFC, Ye Jianming, just as they were tendering 14% of a Russian state-owned energy
company. That was a deal valued at $9 billion dollars. It's pretty sleazy. It's pretty amazing,
actually, that this happened and no one noticed.
We're not going to spend the next six months leading you through a maze of complex financial
transactions. This isn't that complicated: Millions of dollars linked directly to the Communist
Party of China went to Joe Biden's family, and not because they're capable businessmen. Jim
Biden's one business success appears to have been running a nightclub in Delaware that
ultimately went under.
No, the Bidens were cut in on the world's most lucrative business deals, massive
infrastructure deals in countries around the world for one reason: Because Joe Biden was a
powerful government official willing to leverage his power on behalf of his family.
Now, if that's not a crime, it's very close to a crime and it's certainly something every
person voting should know about. The Bidens didn't do this once. They did it for decades. So
the question is, how did they get away with it for so long? Tony Bobulinski asked Jim Biden
that question directly. To his credit Jim Biden answered that question honestly.
BOBULINSKI: And I remember looking at Jim Biden and saying, 'How are you guys getting
away with this?' Like, 'Aren't you concerned?' And he looked at me and he laughed a little bit
and said, 'Plausible deniability.'
CARLSON: He said that out loud.
BOBULINSKI: Yes, he said it directly to me. One on one, in a cabana at the Peninsula
Hotel.
"Plausible deniability." In other words, "we lie." We get away with selling access to the
U.S. government, which we do not own, because we lie about what we're doing. And as we lie, we
try to make those lies plausible. That's why we call it "plausible deniability." That is the
answer that Joe Biden's brother gave when asked directly.
So the question is, what is Joe Biden's answer to that question? We wish we
knew.
ForFoxSake!!! 1 hour ago Everything that is happening right now is because Trump was
right about the swamp, the media, and the ruling class families who have been selling out
America for decades. ohhappyday657 1 hour ago Tucker is doing this country a great service. The
FBI doesn't seem to want to engage. Mr. Bobulinski is a patriot and we are lucky he came
forward. The Bidens need to be called out for their high crimes and misdemeanors. Joe should be
impeached for his time as VP. Thank you Tucker. resipsaloquitor ohhappyday657 29 minutes ago
You can smell the desperation on the Trump supporters. The lies, the distortions and the
grasping, pathetic search for the proverbial Hail Mary to salvage the quickly sinking ship. If
Mr. Bobulinski is the best you have the Democrats will 'trump' you with: 227,000 dead
Americans, close to 9 million more infected and an economy in tatters. The day of reckoning is
approaching and a dozen Bobulinskis won't change that. Trump and his unseemly administration
are doomed.
On Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson did something he'd never done before: he dedicated his
entire show to a single interview. The person he interviewed was Tony Bobulinski, an
experienced international businessman who found himself working with Hunter Biden, James Biden,
and others on a deal between the Biden group and CEFC, a Chinese energy company with ties to
the communist government and the military. Bobulinski powerfully confirms that Joe Biden was
deeply involved in the transaction, which had its beginnings when Joe was still vice
president.
Fox News has not yet uploaded (and may never upload) the interview in its entirety. However,
the four videos below bring together almost everything from the interview.
Tucker opened by making the point that he was dedicating his show to the Bobulinski
interview because the rest of the American media are assiduously ignoring the story,
downplaying it, or claiming it's a Russian smear. The leader of the Russian smear approach is,
naturally, Rep. Adam Schiff, a man who has all the hallmarks of a conscienceless psychopath.
Ironically, it was Schiff's smear about Hunter Biden's hard drive that led Bobulinski, a
Democrat, to go public with his story.
If you can't watch the interview, here's a brief overview:
Bobulinksi is a former naval officer with a Q clearance. That's an extremely high clearance
level for people working in the Department of Energy -- and Bobulinski worked in the Navy's
nuclear program. He comes from a military family and is very proud of that legacy.
After leaving the Navy, Bobulinski became an international businessman. His expertise led to
Hunter Biden and his people wooing Bobulinski to give them the business expertise they needed
to get their partnership up and running.
The partnership, SinoHawk, was intended to bring together CEFC and the Biden family. Both
Hunter and James Biden, after all, brought nothing to the table other than their last name and,
with it, the promise that China would have access to political influence at the highest level
of American government.
Bobulinski's name recently became public knowledge when James Gilliar, another businessman
working on SinoHawk, sent an email to Tony Bobulinski, setting out the terms Gilliar had been
negotiating with CEFC. What caught everyone's interest was the statement that Hunter would hold
"10[%] for the Big Guy." Bobulinski confirmed that Joe Biden was the "Big Guy."
At this point, Schiff, the media, and Joe Biden, none of whom ever denied the legitimacy of
the email, claimed that the whole thing was a Russian smear. This unfounded accusation got
Bobulinski's dander up. As a naval officer from a military family and a true patriot, being
smeared as a Russian agent was beyond the pale.
Bobulinski demanded that Schiff retract the insult, and when Schiff failed to do so, he went
public and did a full document dump. Bobulinski had saved everything -- every document, every
email, and every text.
That's the quick background to the interview with Carlson, during which Bobulinski said
that
Hunter and James Biden brought nothing to the deal other than the Biden family name.
What China wanted was the Biden family name.
Joe Biden was involved in the business deal, so much so that he had veto power over
negotiations.
In 2017, Bobulinski met Joe Biden twice when the Biden side of SinoHawk was courting him
to step in and act as CEO.
Bobulinski also spoke at length with James Biden, Joe's brother.
When Bobulinski asked James how they could get away with this kind of deal, which seemed
to be falling into dangerous territory, given that Joe could run again for president, James
announced, "Plausible deniability."
The Biden group stiffed Bobulinski, leaving him out of pocket for all his expenses while
channeling CEFC's money into another entity that did not involve Bobulinski.
If we had a decent media establishment, this story would be on every front page and at the
top of every news hour. Instead, Bobulinski is trying desperately to get Americans to know that
he is not a Russian agent and that Joe Biden was in bed with the communist Chinese government,
starting when he was vice president and continuing after he left the White House. This screen
shot from Memeorandum shows that
none of the legacy media outlets is touching the story:
(As an aside, and separate from the Bobulinski interview, a former CIA operations office
believes it's entirely possible that Biden
was already doing China's bidding in 2012, when the Obama administration gave China free
rein in the South China Sea.)
In case the embedded videos do not play, you can find them here ,
here ,
here ,
and here
.
We've always known that Joe Biden is an odd bird. Just think of the lies, the egotistical
boasting, the offers to fight people, the skinny-dipping, and the way he fondles and sniffs
little girls. He is a genuinely creepy man.
It speaks volumes about Washington, D.C. and the Democrat party that Joe spent 47 years in
the swamp and rose to the second highest office in the land. What we've learned now, though,
irrefutably and without any Russian hokum, is that Joe Biden is also a profoundly corrupt man
who willingly sold out America and her allies to enrich himself and his sleazy, incompetent
family.
Fox News has not yet uploaded (and may never upload) the interview in its entirety. However,
the four videos below bring together almost everything from the interview.
Tucker opened by making the point that he was dedicating his show to the Bobulinski
interview because the rest of the American media are assiduously ignoring the story,
downplaying it, or claiming it's a Russian smear. The leader of the Russian smear approach is,
naturally, Rep. Adam Schiff, a man who has all the hallmarks of a conscienceless psychopath.
Ironically, it was Schiff's smear about Hunter Biden's hard drive that led Bobulinski, a
Democrat, to go public with his story.
If you can't watch the interview, here's a brief overview:
Bobulinksi is a former naval officer with a Q clearance. That's an extremely high clearance
level for people working in the Department of Energy -- and Bobulinski worked in the Navy's
nuclear program. He comes from a military family and is very proud of that legacy.
After leaving the Navy, Bobulinski became an international businessman. His expertise led to
Hunter Biden and his people wooing Bobulinski to give them the business expertise they needed
to get their partnership up and running.
The partnership, SinoHawk, was intended to bring together CEFC and the Biden family. Both
Hunter and James Biden, after all, brought nothing to the table other than their last name and,
with it, the promise that China would have access to political influence at the highest level
of American government.
Bobulinski's name recently became public knowledge when James Gilliar, another businessman
working on SinoHawk, sent an email to Tony Bobulinski, setting out the terms Gilliar had been
negotiating with CEFC. What caught everyone's interest was the statement that Hunter would hold
"10[%] for the Big Guy." Bobulinski confirmed that Joe Biden was the "Big Guy."
At this point, Schiff, the media, and Joe Biden, none of whom ever denied the legitimacy of
the email, claimed that the whole thing was a Russian smear. This unfounded accusation got
Bobulinski's dander up. As a naval officer from a military family and a true patriot, being
smeared as a Russian agent was beyond the pale.
Bobulinski demanded that Schiff retract the insult, and when Schiff failed to do so, he went
public and did a full document dump. Bobulinski had saved everything -- every document, every
email, and every text.
That's the quick background to the interview with Carlson, during which Bobulinski said
that
Hunter and James Biden brought nothing to the deal other than the Biden family name.
What China wanted was the Biden family name.
Joe Biden was involved in the business deal, so much so that he had veto power over
negotiations.
In 2017, Bobulinski met Joe Biden twice when the Biden side of SinoHawk was courting him
to step in and act as CEO.
Bobulinski also spoke at length with James Biden, Joe's brother.
When Bobulinski asked James how they could get away with this kind of deal, which seemed
to be falling into dangerous territory, given that Joe could run again for president, James
announced, "Plausible deniability."
The Biden group stiffed Bobulinski, leaving him out of pocket for all his expenses while
channeling CEFC's money into another entity that did not involve Bobulinski.
If we had a decent media establishment, this story would be on every front page and at the
top of every news hour. Instead, Bobulinski is trying desperately to get Americans to know that
he is not a Russian agent and that Joe Biden was in bed with the communist Chinese government,
starting when he was vice president and continuing after he left the White House. This screen
shot from Memeorandum shows that
none of the legacy media outlets is touching the story:
"... I hope you don't mind me opining that the story as written is most likely to be a complete fiction, designed to hide the real source of the fantasy story book that is the Steele dossier. The main mission here being to admit that the dossier was indeed a pack of lies but with the important corollary that J Steele did indeed do some sort of research to dig up the dirt on Trump. Heaven forbid that it ever was discovered that himself, Pablo Miller and Sergei Skripal made the whole thing up over a meal of Zizzi's garlic bread and risotto, washed down with white wine and a bottle of Vodka over at the Mill. ..."
After more than four years of Russiagate we finally learn (paywalled
original ) where the Steele dossier allegations about nefarious relations between Trump and Russia came from:
A Wall Street Journal investigation provides an answer: a 40-year-old Russian public-relations executive named Olga Galkina
fed notes to a friend and former schoolmate who worked for Mr. Steele. The Journal relied on interviews, law-enforcement records,
declassified documents and the identification of Ms. Galkina by a former top U.S. national security official.
In 2016, Ms. Galkina was working in Cyprus at an affiliate of XBT Holding SA, a web-services company best known for its
Webzilla internet hosting unit. XBT is owned by Russian internet entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev.
That summer, she received a request from an employee of Mr. Steele to help unearth potentially compromising information
on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump 's links to Russia, according to people familiar with the matter. Ms. Galkina was
friends with the employee, Igor Danchenko, since their school days in Perm, a Russian provincial city near the Ural mountains.
Ms. Galkina often came drunk to work and eventually got fired by her company. She took revenge by alleging that the company
and its owner Gubarev were involved in the alleged hacking of the Democratic National Committee. A bunch of other false allegations
in the dossier were equally based on Ms. Galkina's fantasies.
So the Steele Dossier that kicked off 4 years of Russiagate hysteria among the US ruling class was cooked up by two Russian
alcoholics from Perm. "Gogolesque" does not begin to describe the grotesque credulity & stupidity of the American elites.
The tales in the dossier were real disinformation from Russians but not '
Russian disinformation ' of the
American Newspeak variant.
The FBI, and others involved, knew very early on that the Steele dossier was a bunch of lies. But the issue was kept in the
public eyes by continues leaks of additional nonsense. All this was to press Trump to take more and more anti-Russian measures
which he did with
unprecedented generosity . The accusations about a Trump-Russia connection were the 'Russia bad' narrative that pressed and
allowed Trump to continue the anti-Russian policies of the Obama/Biden administration.
A similar string of continuous policies from the Obama/Biden administration's 'Pivot to Asia' and throughout the four years
of Trump is the anti-China campaign.
We now hear a lot about Hunter and Joe Biden's
corrupt deals with Chinese entities. These accusations come with more evidence and are far more plausible than the stupid
Steele dossier claims. Their importance is again twofold. They will be used to press a potential President Joe Biden to act against
China but they will primarily be used to intensify a public anti-China narrative that creates public support for such policies.
I don't know how or at what level, but we are being played. A narrative is being aggressively rammed down our throats about
China in
exactly the same way it was being aggressively rammed down our throats about Russia four years ago;
two unabsorbed
nations
the US government has long had
plans to attack and undermine .
Russiagate was never really about Trump. It was never about his campaign staff meeting with Russians, it was never about a
pee tape, it was never about an investigation into any kind of hidden loyalties to the Kremlin. Russiagate was about
narrative managing the United States into a new cold war with Russia with
the ultimate target being its far more powerful ally China, and ensuring that Trump played along with that agenda.
...
If Biden gets in we can expect the same thing: a president who advances escalations against both Russia and China
while being accused of the other party of being soft on China. Both parties will have their foot on the gas toward brinkmanship
with a nuclear-armed nation, with no one's foot anywhere near the brakes.
""Gogolesque" does not begin to describe the grotesque credulity & stupidity of the American elites."
Not at all. The "elites" know what's going on; it's being done for their benefit, after all. It's the "normals" who are being
sheared of the little wool left on our backs. Just one more true grand larceny before the whole thing falls apart. And for this
we need a real enemy. From the great Antiwar.com:
It's like living in a "B" movie. Probably many of the same sorts of people behind it too. The lack of imagination and knowledge
in these propaganda narratives tells you a lot about the mediocrities behind them. In considering these US foreign policy excesses,
real and imagined, I keep thinking at some point reality is going to raise its ugly head and Washington will collapse in a puddle
of spite. I expect the next adminstration to be overwhelmed by its domestic problems, along with quite a few other countries.
I look at what is going on in Western societies today and I think of the movie Brazil.
I think this stuff will matter more if Trump wins than if Biden wins. (I'm thinking 3:2 odds in favor of Biden, by the way).
If Biden wins, Republicans will make a lot of noise, but that's about it. Without a huge majority of Congress, they can't do
even what little token effects Democrats had to "stop Trump". Then, whenever Harris takes over, she can just distance herself
from the whole thing.
If Trump wins, however, the flag humpers in the administration will have the ammunition they need in the fight over Russiagate.
Not to shut it down, but to take control of it for their own political ends, and perhaps take down someone famous in the media
and intimidate the rest - in a replay of the post-9/11 Bush era (not that it ever stopped). So you can thank Democrats for handing
them the setup to do all that, not to mention for nominating Biden, if that is the path we take.
More realistically, Trump still loses, but Dems might fail to get an effective majority in the Senate (something like a 51-49
majority might not be enough in practice, because the most conservative Democrats in the Senate vote Republican half the time.).
Again it makes no difference for foreign policy, but it could really change how the country responds to economic hardship, now
baked in due to the virus.
The MIC needs a Cold War to boost military expenditure. The bigger the boogeyman the more money will be spent the more profits
will be generated.
They don't want a hot war as all those profits are meaningless if you are reduced to ashes.
The last thing the MIC can afford is for peace and goodwill amongst nations to break out. There is absolutely no profit in
that.
Eisenhower warned against the rise of the MIC for this very reason. If war is profitable then to keep generating more profits
you need to keep on generating more wars.
Trump proposed to ally with Russia against China. MAGA clearly implies the US was, is weakening, one way out (classical) is
to ally (perhaps only lightly) with one of the other two strong powers. This was total anathema to part of the PTB, mostly represented
(officially) by Dems. An all-out attack on Trump thus took place (before he was elected, because all was known) as a stooge for
Russia, etc. Russia 3x, Russiagate, all of it clumsily made-up rubbish.
Surely now with Hunter's lap-top and the exposé of Biden-China ties (pay to play at the highest level, potentially billions,
not minor corruption chicken-sh*t..) it is possible to grasp that one faction of what some call the Deep State is more pro-China
i.e. the aspirations towards that type of society (I leave that aspect aside ..) and the opportunities for money extraction /
deals - see tech etc. / also sales (MIC, etc.) favor China. The noise about Chinese incursions (Tibet, sea.. etc.), Chinese human-rights
violations (Uighurs, etc.), and the OBOR initiative have always been somewhat glancing more pro-forma than anything else..
It was the 'Dem' faction of the duopoly, Obiman + Biden who 'did' Ukraine, an anti-Russian move (on the face of it. Perhaps
it was just an extraction scheme, Mafia style. Of course they had the keen involvement of Germany and support from France.)
I have boiled down complex issues to just one "narrative arc", a simplification if you will, I am aware there is much more
to it all
Question. There is a well-know board on which sit, amongst many others:
Mary T. Barra (CEO Gen. Mot.)
Carlos Ghosn (Renault etc.)
H. Kruger (BMW)
Elon Musk
Henry Paulson
Lloyd Blankfein
Laurence Fink (Blackrock)
M. L. Corbat (Citigroup)
Tim Cook
Michael Dell (Dell co.)
S. Nadella (Microsoft)
IMO, the current Imperial policy goals of the Outlaw US Empire will continue regardless who wins. IMO, the ultimate question is
if the Empire has enough power to continue on its current track. As most know, I see a drowning empire trying to disrupt the rapid
rise of two strategically bound nations and those allied with them. China just finished planning and publishing its 14th 5-year
plan. This Global Times editorial is supremely
confidant for good reason:
"The fifth plenary session of the 19th CPC Central Committee is leading the country forward. China has the capital and ability
to do so. In this turbulent world, the meeting has provided a practical and significant guide for our direction, goal and tactics.
Despite the many problems, China's political philosophy can constantly generate positive energy to solve the problems, instead
of letting the problems crush positive energy.
"At the moment, China is facing the most problems and challenges. However, the country is also the most confident now. Other
countries have posed many difficulties, but they provide reference and proof that we are doing better . As the world suffers
from shrinking demand and negative growth, we are demanding real and comprehensive growth to realize new achievements in six areas.
The country is self-driven ." [My Emphasis]
It's been announced that "The 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) will hold a press conference Friday
to introduce the guiding principles of its fifth plenary session."
As for Russia's direction, that was very clearly mapped out by Putin and Lavrov's recent Valdai Club speeches and Q & A sessions
and other interviews over the past ten days or so. Compared to the drowning Outlaw US Empire, China and Russia combine to offer
the world two not so different examples that are clearly superior to Neoliberal Parasitism. And the longstanding Imperial edict
of the Outlaw US Empire saying no threat of a better example can be allowed to exist forms the basis for the confrontation. However,
it's no longer just China and Russia that provide such threats as a majority of the world's nations want to join Win-Win and scupper
Zero-sum. So the already joined contest between two differing ideological blocs will escalate until the drowning Outlaw US Empire
finds it no longer possess the power to dominate outside its borders, but will still have its domestic populace to exploit until
they too revolt.
The similarities are there, except that Trump's investigation had not one document of compromat even after 3 years, whilst Biden's
already has many from day 1.
Yes, the deepstate attacks Russia from the left, and China from the right, but this does not imply that members of the body
politic are not subservient to either side, ever.
Only that Trump was never a Russian stooge, nor did they ever hold compromising documents over him, whilst Biden seems the
Cleon of the modern age, that his business partners say he is. Is this compromat? Maybe, but at the very least this is graft.
And that should be enough to send him into the gutter.
This is a good report as is usually the case here at MoA. Yet, there is nothing really new in this at all other than the details
of how the Western empire goes about enforcing its will on the world.
Sense August 6, 1945 the Imperial policy has been "Global full spectrum domination." and to that end it was determined that Russia
and China were to be considered one enemy and must be attacked simultaneously.
In the 75 years sense that date when the Western empire declared the world belonged to it and it alone to rule the Western empire
has slaughtered innocent people across the globe tens of millions of them, additionally in the last 20 years alone the Western
empire has displaced over 37 million people, kicked them out of their homes destroyed their towns and communities. For 75 years
non stop slaughter of innocent people.
Western Liberal Democracy and indeed Western civilization itself is an utter and contemptible failure irredeemable in any form
which we might recognize as "democracy'
Why do media corporations put out remake after remake of popular movies? Is it because they lack imagination, or is it that
audiences prefer the familiar.
They use the same war propaganda time after time because the audience falls for it more easily if they've heard it before.
I agree with Michael, however, that we are in dire planetary straits at this point.
Apparently, our ruling overlords are putting in a Hail Mary plan to slow down the destruction of the ecosystem. I don't believe
that it is the virus that made them screech the brakes on the global economy back in March. They have a plan to reset and scale
back consumption.
We all knew it couldn't last forever, anyway, right?
I'm not so sure about the overall conclusions, instead I'm sidetracked by the attempt to whitewash Russiagate. I guess they
finally figured out they had to come up with some kind of lame excuse to brush it off.
"It wasn't me! It was some crazy drunk Russian woman from Perm! She was angry!"
Well that explains everything. They must have been so scared :D
Because that's what people do when they get fired isn't it? Instead of getting a new job (or drinking a bit more, or sliding
down the slippery slope of society) they make up and tell stories about politicians in other countries. Not to blackmail anyone,
oh no, only to try to tarnish the reputation of the old boss to get revenge. Stuff like this is why watching soap operas (including
"Friends") is bad for you :)
"We need a scapegoat but we don't have any good ones available right now, however someone we know has an aunt in Perm who
will do anything for money"
It still doesn't make sense but now instead of a problem that doesn't make sense they have a solution that doesn't make sense.
They probably threw a party to celebrate how smart they were.
"A narrative is being aggressively rammed down our throats about China": I usually respect Caitlin's work a lot but how does
this jive with the MSM and Techno-platforms desperate attempts to block all circulation of anything to do with the Biden corruption
scandals? Digging deeper into these issues is toxic not just for Biden, but for a significant segment of the neoliberal elite.
The economic elites need time to decouple their profits from China before any real head-to-head battle commences, Biden (or
Kamala) will bark a lot but bite much less given the probable wealth-vaporization of increased hostilities with China.
P.S. the number of COVID cases in Sweden is exploding, so to quote one of my favourite movie reviewers (The Critical Drinker)
can the Sweden trolls please "just go away now".
I don't argue popularity, but strength. Trump is a weakling, both as a person and as a president IMO.
US presidential system won't allow true leaders but puppets (or easily manipulated persons), it is all I'm saying. Do we need
more than last 4 years of Trump's reign as a proof?
Because the U.S. public is close to brain dead We can't detect obvious lies no matter how brazen.
Let's suppose I told you something was absolutely true and I literally started out by saying, 'Once upon a time there was an
evil stepmother ...'. Or I told you about about a villainous neighbor while literally playing a sad song on a violin.
I do not consider myself a genius, in fact I was a neocon but good God, I could just tell I was being lied to just by the pattern
of the stories. I didn't know what the truth was but I knew they were lying.
A doozy with FOX promoting genocide against Iran
FOX news does a story about the terrorist attack in France and in the very next segment without any commercial breaks they
interview a Congressman about Iran. Now they did not say Iran was responsible but clearly this was a puppet show to make just
that association. In addition to the standard blood libel, the Congressman talked about a tweet the Ayatollah made in 2014, so
it was not as if there even was any newsworthy item to discuss about Iran. It was just to frame them for something they did not
do.
On top of the 2001 Sino-Russian Friendship Treaty, both nations also signed an agreement in 2008 officially ending all territorial
disputes between the two countries. With no exceptions, the border between Russia and China is fixed.
In addition northeast China (or that area historically known as Manchuria) is now
a rustbelt area and is deindustrialising.
People especially young people are moving away from this part of the country and into the cities farther south to find more job
opportunities. According to
this Mercatornet.com
article , fertility rates in this part of Northeast Asia across all ethnic groups are the lowest in the world and this part
of China is heading for demographic collapse.
Probably the only people in China and Russia who still have fantasies about seizing one another's territories in Northeast
China and the Russian Far East are gameboys who spend too much time playing computer games or nattering with one another on their
blogsites and who would suffer cardiac arrest the moment they step away from the screen (or who would suffer cardiac arrest anyway
from playing games two or three days straight).
US economy and US life in general is wholly dependent on China. Face masks or pharmaceuticals, car parts or building materials,
it comes from China. No, we cannot resume making these things in US, we do not know how. When 3M was told to get busy and make
masks under Defence Procurement authority all they could do was refer to Chinese subsidiary. Clear enough it is the "subsidiary"
that has the whip hand. What do we have for them? Treasury bonds? Or we can start handing over real estate. Maybe if we give them
the West Coast they will supply us for a time.
One of the big stalls with the Foxconn-Racine plant has been there are no American engineers to hire. Just none. All Chinese
staff would be easier. Or Chinese lords supervising American coolies.
US basically does not trade with Russia. They have unloaded US paper securities. All we get from them is service as a bogeyman.
If we needed another bogey we could get that easy, make up some shit as always.
Mostly true but it's not because the US cant make these products it's because the shareholder class decided long ago
their portfolios would be better enhanced by cheaper labor costs outside the US.
And just as important, the US consumer prefers a "bargain price" and wants cheap goods more than a living wage, especially
those consumers who own some stocks (52% of Amerikkkans own at least some shares, usually in a 401k plan) and believe they too
are participating in the global wealth machine.
BTW, nearly as much stuff is made in Mexico and exported into the US as is made in China and products from both countries are
made by multinational corporations whose ownership consists largely Amerikkkan/western elites.
The problem isn't national-based, it is class based and international .
They are only trying to trick us into believing the problem is we are lazier than the Chinese.
The Chinese authorities have been prosecuting corrupt officials for many years. The prospect of certain USAi officials like
the Biden family carpetbaggers and their Chinese associates being prosecuted in public courts in China with no plea bargaining
and all those other niceties would be a delight for eyes and ears.
Be careful with those threats USAi, it could come back to haunt you.
I hope you don't mind me opining that the story as written is most likely to be a complete fiction, designed to hide the
real source of the fantasy story book that is the Steele dossier. The main mission here being to admit that the dossier was
indeed a pack of lies but with the important corollary that J Steele did indeed do some sort of research to dig up the dirt
on Trump. Heaven forbid that it ever was discovered that himself, Pablo Miller and Sergei Skripal made the whole thing up over
a meal of Zizzi's garlic bread and risotto, washed down with white wine and a bottle of Vodka over at the Mill.
I am with you Corkie. That is about the strength of it. The WSJ is BS from front page to last.
People who claim Trump is undermine the republic are wrong. The last nail in the coffin of
the republic was put by George Bush, We are now living in the empire.
The replacement of the republic with the "national security state" started with Truman,
reached local max in 1963 when a faction within CIA killed JFK and irrevocably became an
empire in 1991 with the disappearance of the USSR. And the global neoliberal empire ruled
from Washington that the USA tries to maintain as a world hegemon is a death sentence to
republic and democracy. So it is fair to say that formally republic (and democracy) in the
USA seized to exist after dissolution of the USSR, when the USA ruling elite became drunk
with the feeling of the only world superpower and neocons start to determine the USA foreign
policy. People just became hostages, forced to support and die in imperial wars, while
standard of living of lower 80% of population start gradually sliding, like always happens
with empires, and manufacturing (and jobs) stared to move oversees, mainly in China. The
decline started actually under Carter.
Truman initiated the transition of the republic into national security state by creating
CIA, NSA and FBI. Herbert Hoover was probably the first who noted that now "tail is wagging
the dog ": intelligence agencies were able to the control of Congress and executive branch
via dirt of politicians and other standard for the "deep state" tricks. To say nothing about
Allan Dulles, CIA and JFK assassination.
And later Obama managed to paraphrase Mr. Orwell 1984, "We always have to be at war with
Eastasia." Just 30 years later. Now you need to add to this pervasive wiretapping of all
communications due to the treat of terrorism.
The look how easily the deep state derailed Sanders candidacy. Nobody even managed to
scream, until it was too late. As Professor Sheldon Wolin put it we live under "inverted
totalitarianism ":
"One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as
democratic surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested
Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of
all, the media."
Wolin showed us all the realities of and limits of the US form of government. It is still
a livable space and if you do not try to undermine the neoliberal social order they will
leave you alone. There not much forceful indoctrination that was a hallmark of the USSR. It's
still a better country, I can attest.
Also the USA "nomenklatura" is more agile, less fossilized in comparison with Brezhnev's
nomenkatura.
But "we are an empire now" as Karl rove told us. Even formally it is no longer republic as
elected President is more or less ceremonial figure, who does not control non-elected
bureaucrats of the executive branch. they (aka "deep state") control him.
Even in a sense of oligarchic republic ( the democracy for the top 1% or less ) the
democracy is under assault. The "Deep state" is effectively strangulated even this, very
limited form, that existed before 1991 (the year of dissolution of the USSR). As we can see
from Sanders case, or Supreme Court role in Bush II case. And Sanders was definitely a member
of the elite, not some random guy from nowhere. The same was true for Al Gore. But they stole
the election from him, plain and simple.
Wendy Brown moved Wolin ideas further suggesting that neoliberalism is the novel fusion of
economic with political power (one dollar one vote; voters turned into consumers; neoliberal
rationality) and that alone completely "poison democracy at its root" It think I already
wrote about those topics. My judgment here is highly suspect -- I never lived in Washington
and never studied history or political science professionally.
Let's hope for the best. Our great advantage is that we are old and are probably the only
generation that managed to live without the major war. Let's hope that we will be able to die
before WWIII
Still, I think Trump entered (not without influence of Russiagate; and those sleazy
intelligence crooks like Comey, Brennan and Mueller and their clan of "national security
parasites" be those scoundrels internally damned) a very dangerous path -- the path advocated
by neocons and MIC.
"Ultimately, my main concern is that it could lead to actual war with Russia. We should
definitely not be going down that path. We need to get out of all these wars. I am also
concerned about what we are doing to our own democracy. We are trampling the fundamental
principles contained in the Constitution. The only way to reverse all this is to start
indicting people who are participating in and managing these activities that are clearly
unconstitutional."
IMHO the current neo-McCarthysim campaign that was deployed to solve some internal
problems within the Democratic Party (rejection by electorate and subsequent political fiasco
of Hillary Clinton) is a very dangerous tool. You can't blame Trump victory on Russia. That's
simply stupid or disingenuous. Trump election is a sign of systemic crisis of neoliberalism
in the USA, somewhat similar to the crisis of Marxism the the USSR experienced before
dissolution. Rust Belt voters rejected Hillary as the establishment candidate who symbolized
the status quo (which they hate) and that was it.
In such crisis the elite is de-legitimized and often resort to dirty tricks to regain the
lost legitimacy. A war is one such trick. Neo-McCarthyism campaign is another. Of course,
Russia in far from being a saint and bear a part of responsibility for unleashing the civil
war in Donbass (and generally destabilizing Ukraine -- it is a curse to be a neighbor our of
such a large and powerful country; Canadians and Mexicans probably think the same
,
But what currently we see in major MSM looks to me like a classic witch hunt with the
implicit goal to whitewash humiliating for neoliberal Democrats (Clinton wing of the party)
defeat and blame it on the external force (Putin looks really like "Deus Ex Machina" for
democrats . <
While Trump run brilliant election campaign based on opposition to neoliberal status quo,
his elections slogans were completely fake. He completely folded three month after the
elections and now symbolizes "empty governance" as if somebody changed the man. During
election the New York billionaire structured his campaign around three topics which propelled
him to victory.
First, he seemed to comprehend America's status quo crisis -- the
disintegration of neoliberalism that had defined the country since Reagan. Large numbers of
voters understood immediately what he was saying, particularly since the crisis of working
class was largely ignored by the other candidates.
Second, he positioned himself as an "anti-neoliberal status quo" candidate. While two
neoliberal parties instinctively clung to time-tested positions and neoliberal groupthink,
shunning any changes. Trump sidestepped this rigid political thinking of both parties and
crafted a new mix of issues cutting across partisan lines. He embraced traditional GOP
positions such as reduced taxes, school choice, increased defense spending, and rejection of
the idea of human-induced climate change. But he also took positions contrary to Republican
orthodoxy -- Social security and Medicare protection, attacks on neoliberal globalization and
"free trade" regime, rejection of austerity economics . And he manifested contempt for an
important part of neoliberal ideology embraced by both parties -- neoliberal view of
immigration
Third, Trump's disdain for political niceties suggested to voters what he declared
political war on the country's neoliberal elite -- all those despicable neocon think tanks,
university professors, the neoliberal MSM, the managerial class, "national security
parasites", Hollywood, and Wall Street financial titans.
Like Don
Quixote he was alone warrior against neoliberalism and all-powerful adversaries. And
he wouldn't buckle when they fought back to protect their cherished neoliberal globalization
and privileged standing of multinationals as the real power behind the throne
What emerged from the campaign was a growing recognition that the country stands at a
fundamental crossroads -- whether to follow the elite vision of neoliberal globalism and
"anti-nationalism", with money, people, ideas, and cultures moving freely across increasingly
indistinct borders (Biden administration path); or to retreat to traditional nationalism
including fealty to Western cultural heritage and reject multiculturalism.
In other words the main battle lines in 2020 are really ideological.
But there a lot of problems with painting Trump as a fighter against
Clinton/Bush/Obama-style of neoliberal globalization. After inauguration we saw quite
different Trump. He's abandoned all of his "anti-neoliberal" election promises, particularly
in foreign policy and dealing with Wall Street titans, that helped propel him into office.
And he started openly flirting with prospects of a war with Iran. Probably to please his
Zionist sponsors, but also may be out of his complete and utter incompetence.
That means that now he is unable conduct a meaningful conversation with his voters.
Outside fanatics who will support him in any case, he definitely betrayed them. In this sense
he might have difficulties to preserve his base in 2020. Due to his foreign policy blunder
and Pompeo brass style of gangsterism in foreign policy some of his political capital among
independents shrunk. That same is true with his tax cut. This was a clear betrayal. Add to
this that he was pinned down by Mueller investigation until December 2017, when Strzok-gate
scandal broke and only in 2019 Mueller (and Rosenstein) lost credibility and became a joke.
Mueller investigation actually was a shroud gambit against him based on his own blunders.
But BLM and, especially, riots gave his a short in the arm. So everything is possible
now.
Also one clear achievement of Trump is that clearly and convincingly demonstrated how
corrupt and crooked are neoliberal MSM. As the result I even started watching some Fox news
(Tucker) recently ;-). If somebody predicted that a couple of years ago I would laugh in
his/her face.
A very good (IMHO) overview of the current situation can be found in London review of
books. See
Whether or not this is Donald Trump's last year as president, the near-certainty of new
episodes of reckless overreach by American foreign policymakers means that this is not the last
the country has seen of his America First policy.
October 28, 2020 Tucker Carlson's interview with Tony Bobulinski is must-see TV By
Andrea
Widburg
On Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson did something he'd never done before: he dedicated his
entire show to a single interview. The person he interviewed was Tony Bobulinski, an
experienced international businessman who found himself working with Hunter Biden, James Biden,
and others on a deal between the Biden group and CEFC, a Chinese energy company with ties to
the communist government and the military. Bobulinski powerfully confirms that Joe Biden was
deeply involved in the transaction, which had its beginnings when Joe was still vice
president.
Fox News has not yet uploaded (and may never upload) the interview in its entirety. However,
the four videos below bring together almost everything from the interview.
Tucker opened by making the point that he was dedicating his show to the Bobulinski
interview because the rest of the American media are assiduously ignoring the story,
downplaying it, or claiming it's a Russian smear. The leader of the Russian smear approach is,
naturally, Rep. Adam Schiff, a man who has all the hallmarks of a conscienceless psychopath.
Ironically, it was Schiff's smear about Hunter Biden's hard drive that led Bobulinski, a
Democrat, to go public with his story.
If you can't watch the interview, here's a brief overview:
Bobulinksi is a former naval officer with a Q clearance. That's an extremely high clearance
level for people working in the Department of Energy -- and Bobulinski worked in the Navy's
nuclear program. He comes from a military family and is very proud of that legacy.
After leaving the Navy, Bobulinski became an international businessman. His expertise led to
Hunter Biden and his people wooing Bobulinski to give them the business expertise they needed
to get their partnership up and running.
The partnership, SinoHawk, was intended to bring together CEFC and the Biden family. Both
Hunter and James Biden, after all, brought nothing to the table other than their last name and,
with it, the promise that China would have access to political influence at the highest level
of American government.
Bobulinski's name recently became public knowledge when James Gilliar, another businessman
working on SinoHawk, sent an email to Tony Bobulinski, setting out the terms Gilliar had been
negotiating with CEFC. What caught everyone's interest was the statement that Hunter would hold
"10[%] for the Big Guy." Bobulinski confirmed that Joe Biden was the "Big Guy."
At this point, Schiff, the media, and Joe Biden, none of whom ever denied the legitimacy of
the email, claimed that the whole thing was a Russian smear. This unfounded accusation got
Bobulinski's dander up. As a naval officer from a military family and a true patriot, being
smeared as a Russian agent was beyond the pale.
Bobulinski demanded that Schiff retract the insult, and when Schiff failed to do so, he went
public and did a full document dump. Bobulinski had saved everything -- every document, every
email, and every text.
That's the quick background to the interview with Carlson, during which Bobulinski said
that
Hunter and James Biden brought nothing to the deal other than the Biden family name.
What China wanted was the Biden family name.
Joe Biden was involved in the business deal, so much so that he had veto power over
negotiations.
In 2017, Bobulinski met Joe Biden twice when the Biden side of SinoHawk was courting him
to step in and act as CEO.
Bobulinski also spoke at length with James Biden, Joe's brother.
When Bobulinski asked James how they could get away with this kind of deal, which seemed
to be falling into dangerous territory, given that Joe could run again for president, James
announced, "Plausible deniability."
The Biden group stiffed Bobulinski, leaving him out of pocket for all his expenses while
channeling CEFC's money into another entity that did not involve Bobulinski.
If we had a decent media establishment, this story would be on every front page and at the
top of every news hour. Instead, Bobulinski is trying desperately to get Americans to know that
he is not a Russian agent and that Joe Biden was in bed with the communist Chinese government,
starting when he was vice president and continuing after he left the White House. This screen
shot from Memeorandum shows that
none of the legacy media outlets is touching the story:
(As an aside, and separate from the Bobulinski interview, a former CIA operations office
believes it's entirely possible that Biden
was already doing China's bidding in 2012, when the Obama administration gave China free
rein in the South China Sea.)
In case the embedded videos do not play, you can find them here ,
here ,
here ,
and here
.
We've always known that Joe Biden is an odd bird. Just think of the lies, the egotistical
boasting, the offers to fight people, the skinny-dipping, and the way he fondles and sniffs
little girls. He is a genuinely creepy man.
It speaks volumes about Washington, D.C. and the Democrat party that Joe spent 47 years in
the swamp and rose to the second highest office in the land. What we've learned now, though,
irrefutably and without any Russian hokum, is that Joe Biden is also a profoundly corrupt man
who willingly sold out America and her allies to enrich himself and his sleazy, incompetent
family.
Fox News has not yet uploaded (and may never upload) the interview in its entirety. However,
the four videos below bring together almost everything from the interview.
Tucker opened by making the point that he was dedicating his show to the Bobulinski
interview because the rest of the American media are assiduously ignoring the story,
downplaying it, or claiming it's a Russian smear. The leader of the Russian smear approach is,
naturally, Rep. Adam Schiff, a man who has all the hallmarks of a conscienceless psychopath.
Ironically, it was Schiff's smear about Hunter Biden's hard drive that led Bobulinski, a
Democrat, to go public with his story.
If you can't watch the interview, here's a brief overview:
Bobulinksi is a former naval officer with a Q clearance. That's an extremely high clearance
level for people working in the Department of Energy -- and Bobulinski worked in the Navy's
nuclear program. He comes from a military family and is very proud of that legacy.
After leaving the Navy, Bobulinski became an international businessman. His expertise led to
Hunter Biden and his people wooing Bobulinski to give them the business expertise they needed
to get their partnership up and running.
The partnership, SinoHawk, was intended to bring together CEFC and the Biden family. Both
Hunter and James Biden, after all, brought nothing to the table other than their last name and,
with it, the promise that China would have access to political influence at the highest level
of American government.
Bobulinski's name recently became public knowledge when James Gilliar, another businessman
working on SinoHawk, sent an email to Tony Bobulinski, setting out the terms Gilliar had been
negotiating with CEFC. What caught everyone's interest was the statement that Hunter would hold
"10[%] for the Big Guy." Bobulinski confirmed that Joe Biden was the "Big Guy."
At this point, Schiff, the media, and Joe Biden, none of whom ever denied the legitimacy of
the email, claimed that the whole thing was a Russian smear. This unfounded accusation got
Bobulinski's dander up. As a naval officer from a military family and a true patriot, being
smeared as a Russian agent was beyond the pale.
Bobulinski demanded that Schiff retract the insult, and when Schiff failed to do so, he went
public and did a full document dump. Bobulinski had saved everything -- every document, every
email, and every text.
That's the quick background to the interview with Carlson, during which Bobulinski said
that
Hunter and James Biden brought nothing to the deal other than the Biden family name.
What China wanted was the Biden family name.
Joe Biden was involved in the business deal, so much so that he had veto power over
negotiations.
In 2017, Bobulinski met Joe Biden twice when the Biden side of SinoHawk was courting him
to step in and act as CEO.
Bobulinski also spoke at length with James Biden, Joe's brother.
When Bobulinski asked James how they could get away with this kind of deal, which seemed
to be falling into dangerous territory, given that Joe could run again for president, James
announced, "Plausible deniability."
The Biden group stiffed Bobulinski, leaving him out of pocket for all his expenses while
channeling CEFC's money into another entity that did not involve Bobulinski.
If we had a decent media establishment, this story would be on every front page and at the
top of every news hour. Instead, Bobulinski is trying desperately to get Americans to know that
he is not a Russian agent and that Joe Biden was in bed with the communist Chinese government,
starting when he was vice president and continuing after he left the White House. This screen
shot from Memeorandum shows that
none of the legacy media outlets is touching the story:
A collection of confidential documents related to the Biden family mysteriously vanished
from an envelope sent to Fox News host Tucker Carlson , the host said on
Wednesday night.
Carlson's team allegedly received the documents from a source on Monday. At the time,
Carlson was on the West Coast filming an interview with Tony Bobulinski, the former business
partner of Hunter Biden and James Biden. Carlson requested the documents to be sent to the West
Coast.
According to Carlson, the producer shipped the documents overnight to California using a
large national package carrier. He didn't name the company, saying only that it's a "brand name
company."
"The Biden documents never arrived in Los Angeles. Tuesday morning we received word from our
shipping company that our package had been opened and the contents were missing," Carlson said.
"The documents had disappeared."
The company took the incident seriously and immediately began a search, Carlson said. The
company traced the package from when it was dropped off in New York to the moment when an
employee at a sorting facility reported that the package was opened and empty.
" The company's security team interviewed every employee who touched the envelope we sent.
They searched the plane and the trucks that carried it. They went through the office in New
York where our producers dropped the package off. They combed the entire cavernous sorting
facility. They used pictures of what we had sent so that searchers would know what to look
for," Carlson said.
"They far and beyond, but they found nothing."
"Those documents have vanished," he added.
"As of tonight, the company has no idea and no working theory even about what happened to
this trove of materials, documents that are directly relevant to the presidential campaign
just six days from now."
Executives at the shipping company were "baffled" and "deeply bothered" by the incident,
Carlson said.
Carlson's interview with Bobulinski aired on Tuesday night. In the interview, Bobulinski
opined that Joe Biden
and the Biden family are compromised by China due to the business dealings of Hunter Biden and
James Biden. Joe Biden has not publicly responded to Bobulinski's allegations, but during a
presidential debate on Oct. 22 said he had "not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in
my life."
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Bobulinski provided more than 1,700 pages of emails and more than 600 screenshots of text
messages to Senate investigators and handed over to the FBI the smartphones he used during his
business dealings with the Bidens. The documents detailed a failed joint venture between a
billionaire tied to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and a company owned by Hunter Biden,
James Biden, Bobulinski and two other partners.
While the corporate documents don't mention Biden by name, emails sent between the partners
suggest that either James Biden or Hunter Biden held a 10 percent stake for the former vice
president. In the email, the stake is assigned to "the big guy," who Bobulinski says is Joe
Biden.
_arrow NoDebt , 3 minutes ago
I heard Tucker talk about this earlier tonight and realized we are FULLY controlled now.
Whatever the **** is going on, whether this is true or not doesn't matter. We are just
unwitting participants in some kind of TV reality show now. Everything is meaningless.
lwilland1012 , 5 minutes ago
Please tell me he was smart enough to make copies...
CatInTheHat , 1 minute ago
Ok.
What was IN the documents and from whom?
This is an inside job. Probably a never Trumper at Fox. There are a few.
quanttech , 3 minutes ago
If Trump loses, Fox will go full Dem. Trump will start TrumpTV, and Tucker will need a
job....
btw, Tucker should get the Nobel Peace Prize for keeping us out of Iran for the last 3.5
years.
Nona Yobiznes , 4 minutes ago
This story doesn't make sense. You sent confidential, highly sensitive documents via post?
Because Tucker was on the west coast? You couldn't scan them in? Were they originals, and are
there copies? This doesn't smell right.
icolbowca , 6 minutes ago
Takes a special kind of moron to send something like that via mail...
"... Biden's campaign earlier this month said Biden never had a meeting with an executive at a shady Ukrainian gas company, Burisma Holdings, while he was the vice president and his son sat on the board of the firm. A report from the New York Post, citing alleged Hunter Biden emails, suggested Hunter Biden had arranged a meeting between him, the executive, and Joe Biden. ..."
Delivery giant UPS
confirmed Thursday it found a lost trove of documents that Fox News' Tucker Carlson said would
provide revelations in the ever-growing scandal involving Joe Biden 's son Hunter and his overseas
business dealings.
UPS Senior Public Relations Manager Matthew O'Connor told Business Insider on Thursday
afternoon that the documents are located and are being sent to Carlson.
"After an extensive search, we have found the contents of the package and are arranging
for its return," he said in a statement.
"UPS will always focus first on our customers, and will never stop working to solve issues
and make things right. We work hard to ensure every package is delivered, including essential
goods, precious family belongings and critical healthcare."
It came after Glenn Zaccara, UPS's corporate media relations director, confirmed Carlson
used the company to ship the materials before they were lost.
"The package was reported with missing contents as it moved within our network," Zaccara
said before they were located. "UPS is conducting an urgent investigation."
During his Wednesday night broadcast, Carlson said that a UPS employee notified them that
their package "was open and empty apparently, it had been opened."
"The Biden documents never arrived in Los Angeles. Tuesday morning we received word from
our shipping company that our package had been opened and the contents were missing," Carlson
also remarked. "The documents had disappeared."
On Tuesday night, Carlson interviewed former Hunter Biden associate Tony Bobulinski, who
claimed that the former Democratic vice president could be compromised by the Chinese Communist
Party due to Hunter and brother James Biden's business dealings in the country.
Joe Biden has not responded to Bobulinski's allegations. Last week during his debate with
President Donald Trump, he said he had "not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my
life."
Biden's campaign earlier this month said Biden never had a meeting with an executive at a
shady Ukrainian gas company, Burisma Holdings, while he was the vice president and his son sat
on the board of the firm. A report from the New York Post, citing alleged Hunter Biden emails,
suggested Hunter Biden had arranged a meeting between him, the executive, and Joe Biden.
It's now possible that a special counsel will investigate Joe Biden should he win the
presidency.
"You know, I am not a big fan of special counsels, but if Joe Biden wins the presidency, I
don't see how you avoid one," Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.)
said . "Otherwise, this is going to be, you know, tucked away, and we will never know
what happened. All this evidence is going to be buried."
UPS did not provide further details about the apparent mishap.
"... Hunter Biden is the modern equivalent of the pre-Reformation papacy selling indulgences. Cash in exchange for unfettered passage into the promised land ..."
"Former Biden insider Tony Bobulinski allegedly has a recording of Biden family operatives
begging him to stay quiet , or he will "bury" the reputations of everyone involved in Hunter's
overseas dealings.
According to The Federalist 's Sean Davis, Bobulinski will play the tape on Fox News'
"Tucker Carlson Tonight" on Tuesday , when Carlson will devote his show 'entirely' to an
interview with the Biden whistleblower."
"According to a source familiar with the planning, Bobulinski will play recordings of Biden
family operatives begging him to stay quiet and claiming Bobulinski's revelations will "bury"
the reputations of everyone involved in Hunter's overseas deals."
As The Federalist notes:
The Federalist confirmed with sources familiar with the plans that Bobulinski, a retired
Navy lieutenant and Biden associate, will be airing tapes of Biden operatives begging
Bobulinski to remain quiet as former Vice President Joe Biden nears the finish line to the
White House next week.
Bobulinski
flipped on the Bidens following a Senate report which revealed that they received a $5
million interest-free loan from a now-bankrupt Chinese energy company .
According to the former Biden insider, he was introduced to Joe Biden by Hunter, and they
had an hour-long meeting where they discussed the Biden's business plans with the Chinese, with
which he says Joe was "plainly familiar at least at a high level." " Zerohedge
--------------
First of all, Bobulinski is NOT a "retired Navy lieutenant." He is a former Navy
Lieutenant.
Well, folks, it's up to you to watch TC's show tonight if you want to learn about this.
Tucker's show is the most watched news show in the history of cable television, so the pain
should not be too great, pl
I don't watch cable TV so I'll have to depend on the objectivity of observers. I'll be
curious who / what is a "family operative"? are they traceable like a military
chain-of-command?
in related news, we can get a fix on the play between private / public behaviors & the
pace of Justice winding.
Tucker Carlson's show is my favorite news/commentary show. I try not to miss it. Because
of the fact that he seems to try hard to verify his sources--and the people he interviews, I
trust him. He also tries to provide guests from the left in an attempt to be fair.
He's definitely not a Hannity, who is the one who turns many off of FOX (though Hannity
comes right after Tucker).
Hunter Biden is the modern equivalent of the pre-Reformation papacy selling
indulgences. Cash in exchange for unfettered passage into the promised land .
Thank goodness the Federal Judge has allowed the lawsuit by the private citizen and
writer, based on the 1990s allegation, to procede without government interference. I'm sure
nobody will do that to democrats in the future. Meanwhile in the Flynn case the DOJ confirms
that the govenment documents and discovery exhibits are ture and correct. I'm sure Judge
Sullivan will procede expeditiously with granting the unopposed motion to dismiss that
case.
This story interests me because I believe he is the first to leave the sinking ship but
not the last.
There would be no reason for this if he thought Joe would win and the investigation would be
snuffed out.
If Trump wins there will most likely be a new version of "Let's Make A Deal" being aired on
the nightly news.
I am down to one package of popcorn. I need to restock.
Actually, indulgences were more akin to BitCoins. Especially after 1567, when His Holiness
the Pope finally officially banned them... but they had been still produced and sold in large
quantities. In France only Richeliue put a stop to this con.
Serve me my plate a Crow. Maybe.
He is saying now that he is 2nd generation military and that they pissed him off claiming he
was a Russian asset.
That is plausible.
Maybe it is both?
Regardless it seems he has a great deal of proof.
I was convinced during the interview. Bobulinsky seemed pretty convincing in his concern
for his own reputation, having been associated with the Biden "Mafia" in the first place.
It was clear during the interview that he had provided Tucker verification for his
claims.
I am more concerned that this revelation comes too late and that many, many people have
voted early. He referenced some hearings that will be held in Congress. I doubt that will
affect the election, given the slow pace of anything getting done in Congress. I voted early,
but I am not personally concerned because I did NOT vote for Biden; however, I am concerned
that those who voted early for Biden could not now change their votes.
SO, if I understand the situation correctly, Bobulinski was essentially sought after, used
and then screwed by the Bidens, which seems risky on the part of the clan. But I guess if Joe
wins the election, they will have gotten away with it as I can't imagine, in spite of any
damning evidence, the Bidens will suffer the same punishing rectal examination-like scrutiny
and vilification the Trump family's been subjected to.
Col Lang,
Hoping you write about your assessment of B and what he had to say.
I found him to be generally credible. All of his motives for singing largely make sense to
me. I think he's a patriot. Some good supporting evidence. He's sharp. I liked him. He's the
kind of guy I'd enjoy working with.
I don't know anything about the realm of international deal making and finance. I'm
wondering how a Navy O3 works his way to enjoying yachts in Monaco while making $millions. Is
he an Annapolis guy? Tight with the right classmates? Not a lot to be found on him via
Google.
He was no longer in the navy when he was messing around with the Biden familia. He was
probably in the Navy three or four years. He ought to lay off on that. I'll think it over
tonight.
Once Wray's FBI gets done with the Rusty Wallace Noose Case they'll have time to deep dive
the laptop he's had for almost a year.
Col.,
Bobulinski seemed awful polished during that interview. Almost too good to be true. Hunter
being a druggy and Burisma payments being real certainly lend an air to credibility.
Turns out Patrick Ho Hunters partner in CEFC had a FISA warrant on him when he was nabbed
in New York awhile back. His first call was to Hunter to seek legal advice and Hunter
represented him. So them scumbags in the FBI have been sitting on this for awhile and will
use it on Joe (if elected) when needed. Must be modus operandi at the FBI in gathering dirt
on all politicians via FISA's, Hoover is still there.
As with all of us Bobulinski is not lily white but is making an effort to clean his act and
those around him. Lily White always comes in degrees. Not much in the NY Times, Wash Post or
WSJ this morning but the WSJ deserves a little credit with McBurn's editorial.
Bobulinski obviously comes from a military family thus his harping on his Navy creds. Guess
when your in that much sunshine you fall back strongly on anything available.
I don't doubt his credibility and it's good that he at least got on Tucker Carlson to
provide some much needed answers, but he's not a known quantity and I have hard time
imagining his revelations will change minds.
I think the FBI sandbagging the whole affair is what holds back this story getting the
attention it deserves from the public. The president I'm sorry to say has been badly served
by Wray, Haspel, and company. I think he should have replaced them months ago and waiting
until reelection to do it may have been a mistake.
Tuesday night, we heard at length and on camera from one of the Biden family's former
business partners. His name is Tony Bobulinski. He's a very successful businessman and a Navy
veteran.
Bobulinski spoke to "Tucker Carlson Tonight" for a full hour. He told us he met two separate
times with Joe
Biden himself. Not just with Joe Biden's son or his brother, but with Joe Biden -- the
former vice president and the man now running for president -- to discuss business deals with
the communist government of China .
That's a very serious claim, and whatever your political views, it's hard to dismiss it when
Tony Bobulinski makes it because Bobulinsky is an unusually credible witness. He's not a
partisan, he's not seeking money, he's not seeking publicity. He did not want to come on our
show.
But when Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and the Biden campaign accused Tony Bobulinski of
participating in a Russian disinformation effort, he felt he had no choice. That was a slander
against him and against his family. So Bobulinski came to us. He arrived with heaps of evidence
to bolster the story he was telling. He brought contemporaneous audio recordings, text
messages, e-mails, many financial documents.
By the end of the hour, it was very clear to us that Tony Bobulinski was telling the truth
and that Joe Biden was lying. We believe that any honest person who watched the entire hour
would come to the same conclusion.
Well, on Wednesday, a
Senate committee confirmed it . The Senate Homeland Security Committee reported that all of
Tony Bobulinski's documents are, in fact, real. They are authentic. They are not forgeries.
This is not Russian disinformation. It is real.
Bobulinski told a remarkable story. Joe Biden -- who, once again, could be president of the
United States next week, was planning business deals with America's most formidable global
opponent. And when he was caught doing it, Joe Biden lied. And then he went further. He
slandered an innocent man as a traitor to his own country. It is clear that Joe Biden did that.
That's not a partisan talking point uttered in bad faith on behalf of another presidential
campaign. It's true.
So the question is, what is Joe Biden's excuse for doing that? What is his version of this
story? Everyone has a version and we'd like to hear it, but we don't know what Joe Biden's
version of the story is, because no one in America's vast media landscape has pressed Joe Biden
to answer the question. Instead, reporters at all levels and their editors and their publishers
have openly collaborated with Joe Biden's political campaign. That is unprecedented. It has
never happened in American history.
Wednesday morning, the big papers completely ignored what Tony Bobulinski had to say. So did
the other television networks. Not a single word about Bobulinski appeared on CNN or anywhere
else. Newsweek decided to cover it, but came to the conclusion that the real story was about
QAnon somehow. This is Soviet-style suppression of information about a legitimate news story.
Days before an election, the ramifications of it are impossible to imagine. But we do know the
media cannot continue in the way that it has.
No one believes the media anymore and no one should. You should be offended by this, not
because the media are liberal, but because this is an attack on our democracy. You've heard
that phrase again and again, but this is what it looks like. In a self-governing country,
voters have a right -- an obligation -- to know who they're voting for. In this case, they have
the right to know the Democratic nominee for president was a willing partner in his family's
lucrative influence-peddling operation, an operation that went on for decades and stretched
from China and Ukraine all the way to Oman, Romania, Luxembourg and many other countries. This
is not speculation once again, and it's not a partisan attack. It's true, and Tony bobulinski
confirmed it.
Bobulinski met with Joe Biden at a hotel bar in Los Angeles in early May of 2017, and when
he did, Joe Biden's son introduced Bobulinski this way: "Dad. Here's the individual I told you
about that's helping us with the business that we're working on and the Chinese."
Now, written documents confirmed this is real. At one point, Joe Biden's son texted Tony
Bobulinski to say that Joe Biden, his father, was making key decisions about their business
deals with China.
CARLSON: When Hunter Biden said his chairman, he was talking about his dad.
BOBULINSKI: Correct, and what Hunter is referencing there is, he spoke with his father
and his father is giving an emphatic 'no' to the ask that I had, which was putting proper
governance in place around Oneida Holdings.
CARLSON: So, Joe Biden is vetoing your plan for putting stricter governance in the
company. I mean, and it's it's right here in the email.
BOBULINSKI: Yes, Tucker, I want to be very careful in front of the American people. That
is not me writing that. That is not me claiming that. That is Hunter Biden writing on his own
phone. Typing in that 'I spoke with my chairman,' referencing his father.
All this is spelled out in the clearest possible language in documents that Bobulinski
provided us, documents that subsequently federal authorities have authenticated as real.
On May 13, 2017, for example, Hunter Biden got an email explaining how his family would be
paid for their deal with the Chinese energy company. His father, Joe Biden, was getting
10%.
BOBULINSKI: In that email, there's a statement where they go through the equity, Jim Biden's
referenced as, you know, 10%. It doesn't say Biden, it says Jim. And then it has 10% for the
big guy held by H. I 1,000% sit here and know that the big guy is referencing Joe Biden. It's,
that's crystal clear to me because I lived it. I met with the former vice president in person
multiple times.
That was three years ago, and we still don't know where all that money went, because the
media haven't forced Joe Biden to tell us. But Tony, Bobulinski did add a telling detail. Joe
Biden's brother, Jim, saw his stake in the deal double from 10% to 20%. Was Jim Biden getting
his brother's share again? It might be worth finding out.
We also know that according to an email from a top Chinese official, this one written on
July 26, 2017, the Chinese proposed a $5 million dollar interest-free loan to the Biden family,
"based on their trust on [sic] BD [Biden] family." The e-mail continued, "Should this Chinese
company, CEFC, keep lending more to the family?" And indeed, CEFC was supposed to send another
$5 million dollars to the Bidens' business ventures. Apparently, that money never made it to
the business. Where did it go? A recent Senate report suggests it went to Hunter Biden
directly. And from there, who knows? Again, no one's asked.
Tony Bobulinski also told us he learned Hunter Biden became the personal attorney to the
chairman of CEFC, Ye Jianming, just as they were tendering 14% of a Russian state-owned energy
company. That was a deal valued at $9 billion dollars. It's pretty sleazy. It's pretty amazing,
actually, that this happened and no one noticed.
We're not going to spend the next six months leading you through a maze of complex financial
transactions. This isn't that complicated: Millions of dollars linked directly to the Communist
Party of China went to Joe Biden's family, and not because they're capable businessmen. Jim
Biden's one business success appears to have been running a nightclub in Delaware that
ultimately went under.
No, the Bidens were cut in on the world's most lucrative business deals, massive
infrastructure deals in countries around the world for one reason: Because Joe Biden was a
powerful government official willing to leverage his power on behalf of his family.
Now, if that's not a crime, it's very close to a crime and it's certainly something every
person voting should know about. The Bidens didn't do this once. They did it for decades. So
the question is, how did they get away with it for so long? Tony Bobulinski asked Jim Biden
that question directly. To his credit Jim Biden answered that question honestly.
BOBULINSKI: And I remember looking at Jim Biden and saying, 'How are you guys getting
away with this?' Like, 'Aren't you concerned?' And he looked at me and he laughed a little bit
and said, 'Plausible deniability.'
CARLSON: He said that out loud.
BOBULINSKI: Yes, he said it directly to me. One on one, in a cabana at the Peninsula
Hotel.
"Plausible deniability." In other words, "we lie." We get away with selling access to the
U.S. government, which we do not own, because we lie about what we're doing. And as we lie, we
try to make those lies plausible. That's why we call it "plausible deniability." That is the
answer that Joe Biden's brother gave when asked directly.
So the question is, what is Joe Biden's answer to that question? We wish we
knew.
ForFoxSake!!! 1 hour ago Everything that is happening right now is because Trump was
right about the swamp, the media, and the ruling class families who have been selling out
America for decades. ohhappyday657 1 hour ago Tucker is doing this country a great service. The
FBI doesn't seem to want to engage. Mr. Bobulinski is a patriot and we are lucky he came
forward. The Bidens need to be called out for their high crimes and misdemeanors. Joe should be
impeached for his time as VP. Thank you Tucker. resipsaloquitor ohhappyday657 29 minutes ago
You can smell the desperation on the Trump supporters. The lies, the distortions and the
grasping, pathetic search for the proverbial Hail Mary to salvage the quickly sinking ship. If
Mr. Bobulinski is the best you have the Democrats will 'trump' you with: 227,000 dead
Americans, close to 9 million more infected and an economy in tatters. The day of reckoning is
approaching and a dozen Bobulinskis won't change that. Trump and his unseemly administration
are doomed.
" ... the former CEO of SinoHawk Holdings, which he said was the partnership between the
CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming and the two Biden family members.
"I remember saying, 'How are you guys getting away with this?' 'Aren't you concerned?'" he
told Carlson.
He claims that Jim Biden chuckled.
"'Plausible Deniability,' he said it directly to me in a cabana at the Peninsula Hotel," he
said.
In the interview, he outlines how an alleged meeting with Joe Biden took place on May 2,
2017.
Fox News first reported text messages that indicated such a meeting. Bobulinski said that
it was the Bidens, not him, who had pushed the meeting.
"They were sort of wining and dining me and presenting the strength of the Biden family to
get me engaged and to take on the CEO role to develop SinoHawk in the U.S. and around the world
in partnership with CEFC," he said.
He went at length into how Joe Biden arrived for a Milken conference, partly held at the
Beverly Hilton Hotel, and how he was introduced by Jim and Hunter Biden to the former vice
president.
"I didn't request to meet with Joe" Biden, he said. "They requested that I meet with Joe
[Biden ]. They were putting their entire family legacy on the line. They knew exactly what they
were doing."" FN
-----------
Bobulinski is a successful international business hustler. I know the type well. The Biden
familia wanted him in this China deal for the purpose of having him hold the reins of this
enterprise even as they looted it for the purpose of quickly enriching the fam.
A TV commentator remarked last night after watching the interview that this defection from
the Biden camp is reflective of an old business truth which can be stated as "don't screw your
partner if he has enough material to sink you."
I am unimpressed with selfless patriotism as Bobu's most basic motivation in sticking it to
Joe, Jimmy and Hunter Biden. A sense of betrayal in a business deal wrecked by the Bidens'
overwhelming greed and their desire to consolidate family riches as fast as they could is a
more plausible. motivation.
This does not mean that Bobu is not telling the truth. His collection of e-mails addressed
to him and incriminating memoranda is most impressive.
IMO, what has been revealed is a truth with regard to the Biden crime family. They are
nouveau riche grifters who will have a much grander stage for their efforts if Joe is elected
as a presidential figurehead. pl
Did Hunter Biden's young business partners bring anything of value to the table, or were
they just name brand ride-alongs too. Archer, Conley, Heinz, etc. Biden was running a very
leaky ship, with such a large but relatively unsophisticated and compromised entourage.
I am, and I'm sure this is not an original observation, because it's as the Col notes,
singularly unimpressed with the entire lot of them. Bobo, Jim B, Hunter B, Duncan Hunter, Joe
B, Bulger's nephew, I've seen more gravitas among bookies, juicemen, and fences, that I grew
up with in NYC. And I mean that. Not a throw away line. And THESE guys will run the show? And
Harris I find singularity creep, artificial, and somehow just down right inappropriate. I
would not select any of them to run a post office.
I got a little tired of the man making so much of his "service to his country." Not that
it isn't worth quite a lot and I respect him for it, but four years... I served six years,
and what I dwell on is how much I loved serving in submarines and the enormous degree that it
contributed to building my character. The degree to which my service benefited my country was
trivial. It benefited me enormously.
Like you, I think he is telling the truth in that interview.
After 4 plus years of the intelligence agencies and MSM looking under every conceivable
rock, you think that there is anything left to find about Trump? You are delusional and
headed for a massive case of buyer's remorse if swiss-cheese-for-brains gets in.
Thank you for asking that question. I was about to ask it myself. My understanding is that
Trump's children are working for him as he is President for little pay. They may be still
handling Trump business accounts; but it seems they work for his White House office and its
many functions--and for his campaign.
I still believe in the American middle class, the people who make American run. These are
the people at his rallies, wearing MAGA hats, and showing up in overflow numbers.
They are not people who are easily swayed by "false prophets."
Trump keeps pointing out how well our economy was doing UNTIL China sent the virus (and, I
DO believe they sent it). He promises the return of that economy.
That is why Biden now is totally into frightening people about COVID and pushing masks and
social distancing. He is afraid that Trump will indeed be able to bring back a good economy.
He doesn't know how to do that, as is clear by this desperate attempt to cover up his shady
dealings with first Ukraine and now China.
Where I live, a large percentage of our population are clearly very tired and bored with
the COVID scare. We still do as our DEMOCRAT Governor, who hails from the People's Republic
of Boulder, Colorado, and the University of Colorado, where Socialist, Marxist, and Ultra
Feminists rule in the Arts and Humanities. We call Boulder "forty square miles surrounded by
reality." Unfortunately, the Boulder/Denver triangle contains the largest voting block. We
used to be able to count on Colorado Springs, but the universities in that area and into
Pueblo have also been taken over by the leftists.
What is also clear is that Biden's real hope was to build his own family dynasty by using
the Presidency as nothing but a cash cow for him and his inept and useless son.
I don't care really what Bobulinski's motives were for coming forward with his documents
and emails, I'm just thankful that he did. I hope it wasn't too late. And I'm thankful he
chose Tucker Carlson's show as the place to do it.
Joe Biden doesn't seem to be the brightest bulb for someone with a JD. To wit: why didn't
he just offer that he's given his son some fatherly advice about business now and then?
Instead, he's repeatedly and categorically denied discussing ANYTHING with his son about his
business dealings, which we now know is provably false. I'm no lawyer but I'd think Joe's
repeated lying infers a tacit admission of guilt. Deniability doesn't seem plausible in this
case.
I'd even go so far as to infer that Joe's gotten away with business dealings of this
sordid sort for SO long that he's become sloppy (e.g., the braggadocio ON VIDEO of
withholding US aid to Ukraine until its solicitor investigating Burisma, which was paying his
son $50-80 thousand per month, was fired.) He obviously has the [justifiable] expectation of
never being held accountable.
Did anyone else clock his comment that he wasn't being paid, not even expenses, for all
these trips. He said he was funding them himself, presumably until the $5M arrived.
Then it didn't but the Bidens got their $5M. The Bidens arrogance just piles onto their
stupidity. Did they really think that kind of operator would take it lying down?
With one foot in Colorado Springs, I'd like to suggest that you may be overstating the
weight of the local colleges in ColSpr's growing Democrat numbers. El Paso county election
results have remained fairly reliably Republican, if not by as sure a margin as once.
Population growth may be more significant mover, the high rate of in-migration to
Colorado, esp Denver. The seven county Greater Denver-Boulder area, with a population of 3.3
million, grew 1.1% last year, and has grown as fast or faster in the previous ten years. In
number, the Denver population has grown faster than anywhere else in the state. In the past
ten years the population of Denver Co alone increased 21%.
Colorado Springs/ El Paso Co. has grown quickly in the same period, but not as much as
Denver. The current population of 720,000 increased 16% from ten years ago. A good part of
this growth has been driven by Denver's growth and skyrocketing housing prices. A house costs
much less in El Paso County.
Too many Denverites are choosing to commute an hour+ from ColSpr to Denver, as seen by the
explosion of new housing at the north end of El Paso County and the now-daily traffic crawl
at rush hour on I-25 between ColSpr and Denver. Just try to get up to the speed limit on that
stretch. The state is adding extra lanes as fast as it can. It appears that Denver attitudes
move in with many of these commuters. Is ColSpr fated to become a bedroom community?
Finally, Colorado appears to be one of the places attracting migrants from the blighted,
overbuilt, overdetermined coasts. Again, newcomers arrive with attitudes from the places they
left.
I am hoping that the open skies and spaces, the particular self-reliance of rural
Colorado, and the more democratic openness to citizen initiatives via the ballot will mellow
their views.
This level of population growth and shifting politics, lacking a concommitant growth in
productivity of local biz and industry, is not viewed with equanimity by older inhabitants of
ColSpr. IMO It would be best if Colorado remained independent, with reasonable political
compromise and collaboration between parties, as before it has been.
Is a comparable dynamic underway north of Denver in your direction?
In reference to Trump's reputation as a grifter, I offer the following sample:
- He paid $2 million in fines and had to close down the Trump Foundation for using it as a
personal piggy bank.
- The Eric Trump Foundation was forced to close for similar grift. It was funneling money
into Trump family businesses and accounts. It's wasn't like the family directly stole money
from kids with cancer, but it ended up doing just that.
- His friend Bannon's recent grift with his Build the Wall Foundation, along with Manafort's
tax and bank fraud convictions, and Cohen's conviction for paying hush money for Trump's
sexual escapades.
- The sham Trump University was forced to close with a $25 million settlement to two class
action lawsuits and a NY civil lawsuit.
None of this sunk Trump. What it did do was inure the American public to the increasing
shittyness of our politician's behavior. Hunter's antics would have caused Joe to withdraw
from public life ten years ago, but today it's just par for the course.
-
TTG
My friend, as I have told you before, you have no real knowledge of practice in the business
world. Nobody says Trump has sold the US for his family's profit.
You'd think that voting Republican would be an easy decision if you work on Wall Street,
especially given the lower taxes and the removal of burdensome regulations. But Democrats have
entangled themselves so deeply in the web of Wall Street, that the industry is now leaning to
the left, according to a new report from
Reuters .
The Center for Responsive Politics took a look at how the industry, and its employees, break
down for the 2020 election cycle.
It has been obvious that Democratic candidate Joe Biden has been outpacing President Trump
when it comes to fundraising, and this is also true of "winning cash from the banking
industry," Reuters notes.
Biden's campaign has been the beneficiary of $3 million from commercial banks, compared to
the $1.4 million Trump has raised. This is a far skew from 2012, where Mitt Romney was able to
raise $5.5 million from commercial banks, while Barack Obama only raised $2 million. In 2012,
Wall Street banks were among the top five contributors to Romney' campaign.
In 2020, campaign contributions to congressional races from Wall Street banks are about
even. Republicans have raised $14 million while Democrats have brought in $13.6 million. About
four years ago, Republicans pulled in $18.9 million, which was about twice as much as the
Democrats raised. In 2012, Republicans raised about 61% of total bank donations.
Interestingly enough, when Biden and Trump are removed from the equation, the highest
recipient from Wall Street is none other than Bernie Sanders, who has raised $831,096. Sanders
often tops contributions in many industries due to his grassroots following.
When you remove the employees from the equation and only look at how the bank's political
arms donate, the picture turns more Republican-friendly.
House of Representatives lawmaker Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri, one of the senior
Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee, which is key for the banking industry,
tops the list, hauling in $226,000. Next up is Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, the top
Republican on that panel, with $185,500 in cash from bank political committees.
The top 20 recipients of bank political funds comprise 14 Republicans and six Democrats.
Representative Gregory Meeks of New York, a senior member of the House banking panel,
received the most among Democrats, with $140,000.
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The shift in data shows that while Wall Street's top brass may still understand the value of
Republican leadership, bank employees themselves may overwhelmingly favor
progressives.
ay_arrow
tonye , 3 hours ago
It's obvious. Wall Street is part of the Deep State...
Le SoJ16 , 3 hours ago
How can you hate capitalism and work for a Wall Street bank?
tonye , 3 hours ago
Because Wall Street is no longer capitalist.
Main Street is capitalist, they create the GNP.
Wall Street is a casino owned by globalists and bankers. They don't create much
anymore.
Macho Latte , 2 hours ago
It has nothing to do with ideology. The Biden is FOR SALE!
Any questions?
Lord Raglan , 2 hours ago
It is because the majority of Wall Street are Jewish and **** overwhelmingly support
Democrats.
David Horowitz has said that 80% of the donations to the Democrat Party come from
****.
KashNCarry , 2 hours ago
What a bunch of ****. Wall St. elites are in it up to their necks casting their lot with
the globalists who want total control NOW. Trump is the only thing in their way....
artvandalai , 3 hours ago
Wall street people don't know much about the real economy. They also know little, nor do
they care about, the real problems faced by business people who have to work everyday to
overcome the policies put in place by liberals.
They do understand finance however. But all that requires is the ability to push paper
around all day.
But let them vote for the Libotards and have them watch Elizabeth Warren take charge of
the US Senate Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection Committee. They'll be jumping
out of windows.
FauxReal , 3 hours ago
Wall Street favors free money?
sun tzu , 1 hour ago
Wall Street wants bailouts. 0bozo gave them a yuge bailout
American2 , 2 hours ago
Based on the massively coordinated MSM suppression of the Biden corruption scandal, now I
know why these folks back Biden.
CosmoJoe , 2 hours ago
Democrats as the party of the big banks,
bgundr , 2 hours ago
Of course banksters favor policies that make the average person a slave with less
agency
Homie , 2 hours ago
Especially if you like the endless bailouts, give-aways, and freedom from those pesky
rules limiting the Squid's diet
You'd think that voting Republican would be an easy decision if you work on Wall Street,
especially given the lower taxes and the removal of burdensome regulations.
mtl4 , 2 hours ago
The shift in data shows that while Wall Street's top brass may still understand the
value of Republican leadership, bank employees themselves may overwhelmingly favor
progressives.
The banks are big on corruption and that's one poll the Dems are definitely leading by a
longshot.......thick as thieves.
tunetopper , 2 hours ago
Wall St youngsters dont realize their job is to whore themselves out as much as possible
to the few remaining classes of folk they dont already have accounts with. The few
Millennials and Gen Xers that have enough capital saved up are their target market. Ever
since the take-down of Bear Stearns and Lehman, and the exit of many others from their
Private Client Groups- the Whorewolves of Wall St are very busy pretending to be Progs and
Libs.
And like this post says: " who really cares, they all live in NY, NJ and CT which are
guaranteed Dem states anyway"
So in essence- they have nothing to lose while pretending to be a Prog/Lib. in order to ge
the clients money.
radar99 , 36 minutes ago
I arrived to wall st in 2010. My female boss at a large investment bank hated me from the
moment I criticized Obama. I was and still am absolutely amazed you can work on wall st and
be a democrat
moneybots , 59 minutes ago
"The shift in data shows that while Wall Street's top brass may still understand the value
of Republican leadership, bank employees themselves may overwhelmingly favor
progressives."
So 50 Cent alone went Trump after finding out NYC's top tax rate would be 62% under
Biden?
Flynt2142ahh , 1 hour ago
also known as MBNA Joe Biden friends, you mean the privatize profits but liberalize losses
crowd that always looks for gubment money to bail out failures - Shocking !
invention13 , 1 hour ago
Wall St. just knows Biden is someone you can do business with.
Loser Face , 1 hour ago
Wall Street leans towards anyone who passes laws that benefit Wall Street.
Obamaroid Ointment , 1 hour ago
The Wally Street crowd has always been a bunch Globalist Mercedes Marxists and Limousine
Liberals, this article is ancient history.
Sound of the Suburbs , 2 hours ago
US politicians haven't got a clue what's really going on and got duped by the banker's
shell game.
When you don't know what real wealth creation is, or how banks work, you fall for the
banker's shell game.
Bankers make the most money when they are driving your economy towards a financial
crisis.
On a BBC documentary, comparing 1929 to 2008, it said the last time US bankers made as
much money as they did before 2008 was in the 1920s.
Bankers make the most money when they are driving your economy into a financial
crisis.
Money and debt come into existence together and disappear together like matter and
anti-matter.
The money flows into the economy making it boom.
The debt builds up in the financial system leading to a financial crisis.
Banks – What is the idea?
The idea is that banks lend into business and industry to increase the productive capacity
of the economy.
Business and industry don't have to wait until they have the money to expand. They can
borrow the money and use it to expand today, and then pay that money back in the future.
The economy can then grow more rapidly than it would without banks.
Debt grows with GDP and there are no problems.
The banks create money and use it to create real wealth.
Caliphate Connie and the Headbangers , 2 hours ago
The banks and corporations of America have been welfare queens since 2008. Regardless of
who wins, they will be the beneficiaries of moar US-style corporate welfare socialism.
Victory_Rossi , 3 hours ago
Wall Street loves globalism and hates the entire ethos of "America First". They're people
with dodgy loyalties and grand self-interests.
FreemonSandlewould , 3 hours ago
What a surprise. The Banking Cartel faction of the Jish Control Grid sent Trotsky and
company to Russia to implement the Bolshevik revolution. Should I be surprised they lean
left?
Well I guess not. But they are at base amoral - that is to say with out moral philosophy.
Their real motto is "Whatever gets the job done".
Yesterday, former Vice President Joe Biden was again insisting that the scandal involving
Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation despite the direct refutation of that claim by
the FBI .
In her interview with Joe Biden, CBS anchor Norah O'Donnell did not push Biden to simply
confirm that the emails were fake or whether he did in fact meet with Hunter's associates
(despite his prior denials). Instead O'Donnell asked: "Do you believe the recent leak of
material allegedly from Hunter's computer is part of a Russian disinformation campaign?"
Biden responded with the same answer that has gone unchallenged dozens of times:
"From what I've read and know the intelligence community warned the president that
Giuliani was being fed disinformation from the Russians. And we also know that Putin is
trying very hard to spread disinformation about Joe Biden. And so when you put the
combination of Russia, Giuliani– the president, together– it's just what it is.
It's a smear campaign because he has nothing he wants to talk about. What is he running on?
What is he running on?"
It did not matter that the answer omitted the key assertion that this was not Hunter's
laptop or emails or that he did not leave the computer with this store.
Recently, Washington Post columnist Thomas Rid wrote
said the quiet part out loud by telling the media:
"We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation --
even if they probably aren't."
Let that sink in for a second. It does not matter if these are real emails and not Russian
disinformation. They probably are real but should be treated as disinformation even though
American intelligence has repeatedly r ebutted that claim. It does not even matter that the
computer has seized the computer as evidence in a criminal fraud investigation or that a Biden
confidant is now giving his allegations to the FBI under threat of criminal charges if he lies
to investigators.
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It simply does not matter. It is disinformation because it is simply inconvenient to treat
it as real information.
Bastiat , 3 hours ago
I should have lost the capacity for shock in reaction to this Mockingbird crap but the
sheer naked audacity of it still gets me.
Carbon Skidmark , 3 hours ago
I don't know what is worse. The concept that hiding crimes is no longer that important or
the lack of response to the crimes by so many.
jin187 , 3 hours ago
I don't know what's worse. The fact that our supposed news networks do this, or the fact
that in spite of the vast majority of Americans saying they distrust them, they still let
them get away with it. They still watch, and read, and listen. TBH, I don't think the lack of
MSM coverage is an issue with this particular story. I think the average Democrats and RINOs
are just covering their eyes and ears with this one. They want Trump to lose so bad, they
don't care if day one of the Biden administration is him handing suitcases of military
hardware blueprints to the Chinese. Anyone with a (D), never Trump, keep the swamp churning.
That's all they care about.
Four chan , 25 minutes ago
the laptop and its contents are 100% verified with clean chain of control.
UndergroundPost , 3 hours ago
It's now clear the Democrat Party under the Biden / Clinton Dynasties is nothing more than
a fully compromised, corrupt and criminal extension of the Communist Party of China
SDShack , 3 hours ago
Absolutely! The timelines of everything line up perfect. These laptops were dropped off at
the computer shop in early 2019. Work was done, but not paid for. The owner tried to get paid
and have the laptops picked up for 3 months. No go, so abandoned property now belongs to the
computer shop. All perfectly legal. It's now fall 2019 and the Impeachment Sham related to
Ukraine is starting. Computer shop realizes that laptops belonged to Demorat VP son being
caught up in the entire Impeachment Sham. Computer shop guy realizes he is holding dynamite
with lit fuse so he contacts FBI. FBI does nothing, then gets involved, then sits on the
story. This is all end of 2019.
Meanwhile, demorat primaries are starting and Bernie is the leader. DNC can't have Bernie
win, so they try to game the system to stop him just like 2016. But no one early on can do
it. Senile Joe fails first. Then Kamalho, who was the favorite, flames out. Then all the
others. It's now early 2020 and the DNC is hemorrhaging money and in disarray. Then look what
happens, the DNC miraculously unities around Senile Joe to stop the Angry Berd, with Kamalho
being the fallback position as VP. It is clear that the CCP ordered the DNC to do this
because they had the goods on Corrupt Joe, and the DNC needs the Chicom money. They all
figured they had it all covered up. They never figured on the crazy cokehead son blowing it
all up. The timelines all line up, and explain why Senile Joe rose from the dead in the
primaries to be the anointed one, along with Kamalho. The CCP got the candidates they bought
and paid for.
GoldmanSax , 1 hour ago
100% true but the republican government refuses to prosecute their buddies. The US has 1
party and we ain't invited.
Robert De Zero , 3 hours ago
It isn't real, we hope it isn't real, you can't prove it's real, 50 experts said it isn't
real, Russia planted it, Russian disinformation, Rudy is compromised, Rudy might be a Russian
agent, Rudy almost banged a 24 YO and he can't be trusted, It's not about Joe we don't care,
Hunter isn't running, Bobulinski has a funny name so he can't be trusted...NOT ONCE ASKING IF
THIS IS a MAJOR PHUCKING PROBLEM.
The problem isn't RUSSIA, it's you bastards in the Big Lies Media!
GoldmanSax , 1 hour ago
Why hasn't the patriotic republicans arrested the evil democrats? Whats the hold up?
tonye , 3 hours ago
At some point we are going to have to break up the corporate media conglomerates.
All of them.
And start racketeering prosecutions.
Salsa Verde , 3 hours ago
Facts mean nothing in a country where emotional outbursts are now considered gospel.
Stable-Genius , 3 hours ago
I think we need to bring back the death penalty in every state and not keep housing these
criminals for lifetimes.
Zorch , 2 hours ago
Wait! What does Gretta say?
VisceralFat1 , 3 hours ago
so... the hunter laptop is fake
and global warming is real
got it
jin187 , 3 hours ago
You just summed up the only thing 90% of students actually learn from 12 years of public
school.
rwe2late , 3 hours ago
correct on both points
Zerogenous_Zone , 3 hours ago
duh...
the Feds have plenty of laptops that have incriminating evidence of our elected leaders
(Wasserman Schultz, Iman Brothers, Weiner, DNC Servers, etc...), Dems and Repubs
at issue is if we REALLY knew the depths of treason from said leaders, we'd run out of
rope and tall trees...
so...anyone who votes Democrat, is complicit in my eyes (and they don't need to vote
Republican) and deserve the heat of the truth, strong enough to melt all the
snowflake-SJW's
Carbon Skidmark , 3 hours ago
ban laptops...it's so simple...no laptops and bad things stop happening
Zerogenous_Zone , 3 hours ago
/sarc
banned public schools first...they're indoctrination centers of controlled deception
NO critical thinking...NO innovative strategies
ONLY State sponsors 'information' filtered by the snowflakes anti-social media platforms
and e-encyclopedia (Schmoogle)
11b40 , 3 hours ago
Ban email & instant messages. Life would be immediately better.
CosmoJoe , 3 hours ago
Dorsey looks like a fvcking homeless person. What a clown. I'd love to rip that ring right
out of his nose.
sunhu , 2 hours ago
losers anger is always fun to watch
chubbar , 3 hours ago
The media is acting against the best interests of the USA. Think about it, "IF" the
allegations are true, we need to find out BEFORE we elect someone who is selling out our
country for personal gain, not after. WHY would the media think differently unless they don't
care whether the allegations are true or not? Are they working for China? Is the DNC? These
are appropriate lines of inquiry given the wholesale censoring the media has levied on the
Biden corruption story. The FBI sat on this for months and it has Child ****, which means
children remain at risk until the FBI goes in and stops it. WTF is wrong with Wray that he
allows this to go on?
somewhere_north , 3 hours ago
Dude, if it was for real Hunter Biden would have been arrested by now. You can't seriously
believe they're just holding back their damning evidence. The obvious conclusion is they
don't have it.
Mr. Universe , 2 hours ago
...except those pictures of a naked Hunter with his niece and the emails of the family
trying to keep a lid on Mom's protestations.
You see lots of pics of Hunter Biden with a blacked out bitch. No way of knowing who he's
actually with.
hugin-o-munin , 2 hours ago
Yeah like duh really man, I mean come on man. Stop thinking so much man, hang ten and
chill bruh.
8-(
Im4truth4all , 2 hours ago
Has Comey, Clapper, Strozk and the list goes on ad infinitum, been arrested? No.
ebear , 1 hour ago
"The obvious conclusion is they don't have it."
An inference, by itself, is not a conclusion.
Soloamber , 2 hours ago
Wray inherited a completely screwed up Comey FBI .
He is not a culture changer .
glasshour , 3 hours ago
Stop calling these people mainstream. There is nothing mainstream about them because
nobody watches their crap.
Joe Rogan's show last night got more views than all of them combined.
WhatDoYouFightFor , 3 hours ago
Hunter is still walking around free, system is F'd. Nothing will right the United States
at this point.
Zerogenous_Zone , 3 hours ago
it's the Hillary conundrum, right?
IF they get Hunter, it's 'election interference'...
deceitful godless individuals...
randocalrissian , 3 hours ago
But but but Her Emails
slightlyskeptical , 3 hours ago
he will always be free on these items as the evidence was all acquired illegally and
likely doctored to all hell.
jin187 , 3 hours ago
This is why I said the day Trump got elected that these people just need to disappear to a
blacksite in Yemen. The best way to drain the swamp is waterboarding all the ones we know to
find the ones we don't know.
Ghost of Porky , 3 hours ago
If Trump rescued 30 drowning children with his helicopter the CNN headline would read
"Trump Increases Carbon Footprint to Risk Superspreader Event.
Stable-Genius , 3 hours ago
Exactly - so tired of MSM and their opinionated lies
pstpetrov , 3 hours ago
Yes Liberals are all about disinformation and Trump has the moral high ground.
randocalrissian , 3 hours ago
Best joke I've heard in October. Well played, sir!
otschelnik , 3 hours ago
How would the MSM react if Don Jr. flew into China on AF1 with his father, met with
Chinese central committee members and intelligence officials, formed a Joint Venture with
them and then got a 5 million dollar no interest loan from the head of a private oil company,
who's chairman used to work in intelligence?
Imagine that. How would ABC MSNBC CNN NPR WaPo NYT PBS broadcast that?
glasshour , 3 hours ago
Better question, who cares. Nobody watches that junk anymore.
fanbeav , 3 hours ago
Liberal sheeple still do.
randocalrissian , 3 hours ago
Let's get the case in a court of law so allegations and wild claims can be proven or
disproven. But wait, this was timed so court isn't an option. So all we are left with is the
sniff test. Smells like baby diaper needs changed.
slightlyskeptical , 3 hours ago
How did they react when it was Kushner doing the traveling and getting the money for his
business?
Iconoclast422 , 3 hours ago
the computer has seized the computer as evidence
Why does every article have these little tidbits that make me think every writer has
stroked out in 2020?
11b40 , 3 hours ago
You see that, too? Something is wrong in the editing process. Sloppy, I guess, or
foreign.
Santiago de Mago , 3 hours ago
I noticed that in several articles today... almost like they are being written by AI
bots.
"My Macaroni And Cheese Is A Lesbian Also She Is My Lawyer"
balz , 3 hours ago
Every time you see someone saying they are a "journalist" at a MSM, don't forget to tell
them they are wrong and their job-title is "propagandist".
Shut. It. Down. , 2 hours ago
Some of the emails have already been verified by the outside recipient or sender.
Next you'll tell me all the sex videos were photoshopped by Putin.
KayaCreate , 1 hour ago
I lost 5 mins of my life watching Hunters **** getting kicked around by a probable minor
while smoking crack. You could tell it was him as his fake teeth glowed in the dark.
Cephisus , 3 hours ago
The media are scum.
Bill of Rights , 3 hours ago
Funny isn't it, every time the Globalist are exposed its " Disinformation " ..Hows that
Russian Collusion evidence coming along? its only been four years.....
American2 , 2 hours ago
The only question remaining to ask is simply this: Who is more enfeebled, Joe Biden; or
the networks and ABC, NBC, CBS, NY Times, WaPo, LA Times?
CosmoJoe , 3 hours ago
I have been out of f*cks to give when it comes to the MSM for a decade now. What is so
comical is that when the MSM so overtly covers for candidates, it backfires horribly. You
can't hyperventilate over an anonymously sourced Trump tax return story and yet ignore the
Biden laptop. People see right through that.
randocalrissian , 3 hours ago
Trump's taxes were made public. Nobody knows where Biden's (or whoever's) laptop came
from. Giuliani is already very late with the promised salacious details. How many people do
you think are really changing their vote to the Domestic Terrorist in the WH?
IndicaTive , 3 hours ago
I know of one person
Invert This MM , 3 hours ago
You are a freaking Share Blue Clown. Nobody buys your monkey dung
IndicaTive , 3 hours ago
You know me so well, after 3 months of trolling here.
Invert This MM , 2 hours ago
You really are one stupid fuuk. You just outed one of your sockpuppets and I was purged in
the Google crack down. I have been posting here for 12 years. You monkeys are really
stupid.
Invert This MM , 2 hours ago
Hey Monkey, I was purged during the Google shake dawn. Been here 14 years. Like a complete
moron, you just outed one of your sockpuppets. Dumbass
replaceme , 3 hours ago
No serious Dem thinks the laptop isn't Hunter's - your supposed to ignore it, or pretend
it has nothing to do with Joe. The Russians, booga boogah
invention13 , 3 hours ago
No, his taxes weren't made public. Claims about his taxes were made public - there is a
difference which you seem happy to elide.
CosmoJoe , 3 hours ago
Trump's taxes as reported by the NY Times were NOT made public, what gives you that idea.
The info was leaked to the Times.
jin187 , 3 hours ago
This is what I want to know. How is it that the NYP is still banned from Twitter based on
them obtaining information "illegally or illicitly", when we know for a fact now that they
didn't? At the same time, I'm pretty sure that the NYT and their followers are still happily
linking and chatting away about the story on how they illegally obtained Trump's tax
returns.
wearef_ckedwithnohope , 3 hours ago
Matt Taibbi has written a series of articles bemoaning the current state of
journalism.
replaceme , 3 hours ago
What's journalism?
invention13 , 3 hours ago
I'm beginning to think it is something that never really existed - just an ideal in some
people's minds.
Shillelagh Pog , 2 hours ago
Journalism is putting down on paper your, or someone you like, or is paying you for,
feelings, duh.
slightlyskeptical , 3 hours ago
He has the same issues with his journalism.
starcraft22 , 1 hour ago
The laptop is real. The media is the foreign disinformation.
Stable-Genius , 3 hours ago
Just shocking how MSM is so quick to dismiss this shocking evidence. We know it's not part
of their brainwashing echo chamber of lies for their low IQ and low informed voters but had
this been one of Trump's sons laptops - this would be MAJOR HEADLINES for the next 12
months.
Remember the 4 year Russiangate investigation, 40 million to Robert Mueller all based on a
bought and paid dossier paid for by the DNC/Clinton foundation, corrupt FBI, FISA warrants
all to spy and setup Trump to incriminate him for the VERY same crimes they were in FACT
committing.
Ar15ak47rpg7 , 2 hours ago
Note to all Zero HEDGERS....there seems to be no difference between the scrubbing of
comments on Twitter and Facebook and ZH. The free flow of ideas on ZH no longer exist. Just
like the Drudge Report the Deep Stater's have gotten to the Tylers. Beware
One of these is not like the others.. , 2 hours ago
I concur, the more thoughtful the post, the more likely it seems to vanish.
ebear , 1 hour ago
I must be an idiot then. As much as I'd like to add that badge to my collection, my stuff
never seems to get scrubbed. Damn!
Urfa Man , 3 minutes ago
Gulag and the shrews that run it are putting big financial pressure on ZH to censor us.
This month I've twice tried to post a URL for the news article that details the censorship
here, but go figure, those posts get scrubbed.
It's all because of you and me. The Bolsheviks at Gulag say this comment section hurts
feelings and therefore must be dominated and controlled with an iron fist.
Gulag Bans ZeroHedge From Ad Platform
If you replace "Gulag" with the name of a major search engine and conduct a search using
the words in italics above - via a search engine like duckduckgo - the results will probably
point you to the news article that gives the details of this ZH censorship and why your
comments disappear.
lacortenews com is the domain that carries the news report
Good luck. There's not much left of free speech or the original freedom of the
internet.
unionbroker , 3 hours ago
A business associate of mine told me with a straight face that he didn't trust Bobulinski
because he had a Russian sounding name. He is on Twitter a lot so maybe that explains it.
slightlyskeptical , 3 hours ago
I don't trust him either. He has already changed his story. he requested to meet Joe Biden
and then later he didn't request it. . And he met him, but he didn't have a meeting with him.
He confirmed that on Fox last night.
Stable-Genius , 3 hours ago
I trust him 100% #imwithhim
remember Dr Christine Ford and her fake as story against Kavanaugh - this is much more
realistic than her fake as
Republicans can play dirty too
jin187 , 2 hours ago
Yeah, this is what it's come to, so **** it. I hope Rudy is out there right now handing
out suitcases of cash to anyone willing to come forward with any lies about Biden, Pelosi,
Schumer, just like our side's Gloria Steinem.
Zerogenous_Zone , 3 hours ago
bring him in under oath and actually investigate...
BUT that would be 'election interference' (you know, the whole Hillary conundrum,
right?)
rule of law is now changed to morality of feelings...if it makes me feel insignificant, it
CAN'T be TRUE!!
WAAAHHHHHH
Stable-Genius , 3 hours ago
he will testify under oath watch - and he won't be like pencil neck Schiff and those other
cowards and plea the 5th
rwe2late , 3 hours ago
???
you could watch the Tucker Carlson show interview instead of your imagined one.
Uh... did watch it. And yes, the story he tells there about meeting Biden is not the same
as the one he told before. Riddle me this: if this is real, why would they hopelessly
compromise their chain of evidence by dribbling it to the public like this?
Stable-Genius , 3 hours ago
because no one in the MSM would dummy - they are all in DEEP ****
somewhere_north , 3 hours ago
They don't have to use the MSM, or any media. They simply arrest Hunter Biden, then drop
all the info at once instead of tantalizingly holding the smoking guns out of our view. All
they are doing here, if they actually have anything, is risking the lives of their witnesses
and giving the perps a lot of warning. That's to say nothing about compromising the evidence
to the point of inadmissability. It's running a risk for no gain whatsoever.
rwe2late , 3 hours ago
stuff is only out of your view if your eyes are closed
rwe2late , 3 hours ago
"not the same" ?
missed your weblink (not that you could be making stuff up, cough, cough.)
also, how that would have any significant bearing on the whole matter,
including most MSM news censorship and Russia nonsense ?
RedNeckMother , 3 hours ago
Who told you that bulls hit?
calculator , 2 hours ago
It's entirely possible he is military intelligence and was sent undercover to infiltrate
the Bidens and discover their treachery. The CIA and FBI sure as hell don't appear to be
doing it. Since we may very well be in a shooting war with the CCP at some point in the near
future, it shouldn't surprise anyone that the military is actually doing their jobs to ensure
we are not compromised.
SDShack , 3 hours ago
We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation --
even if they probably aren't."
Cmon Turley, parse these words> Why does the WaPo say 'WE MUST' treat these leaks this
way? This implies that the WaPo is BEING ORDERED to treat these leaks this way! So WHO has
power over the WaPo? Is that power direct, or financial, or BOTH? Also the assumption the
WaPo is trying to propagate is that the Foreign Intelligence Operation is...THE
RUSSIANS...but could it not actually be the CCP that is pulling the WaPo strings? Doesn't the
CCP revelation go to the central heart of the entire Corrupt Joe matter, as well as the
financial angle for the Bezo's Amazon WaPo? Even in their lies, the nuggets of hidden truth
are exposed.
Amel , 3 hours ago
Asking yourself why the CIA control of the MSM favors a Manchurian candidate over Trump ?
Because the CIA's own survival is valued above national security.
invention13 , 3 hours ago
For they same reason they had to treat the Russian collusion allegations as though they
were real.
LetThemEatRand , 3 hours ago
Same reason there was no outrage at the Obama child cages at the Mexico border. Or outrage
at all of the wars Obama started. Or outrage at all of the drone killing under Obama.
Most Blue Team members are satisfied getting their news from MSM, leaving MSM able to
shape the narrative almost completely. There are a handful of guys like Jimmy Dore on the
left who call out the rest of the left on this. Pretty scary, actually.
factorypreset , 3 hours ago
It sure seems like the press is helping to squash this whole thing by asking any questions
in such a way that Joe doesn't perjure himself.
mtl4 , 3 hours ago
Yesterday, former Vice President Joe Biden was again insisting that the scandal
involving Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation despite the direct refutation of
that claim by the FBI.
All makes perfect sense in a time when you chose your gender in the morning while getting
dressed, you only need to be accused of anything to completely ruin your reputation (unless
your a politician in which case there are no laws). So why would anyone deal with reality at
a time when we've gotten so good at simply ignoring it.
Belarus - Opposition Call For 'Crippling General Strike' Fails To Reach Workers
On April 30 2019 some Random Guyaidó in Venezuela got
snookered into a
coup attempt which turned him into a laughingstock when the troops he had expected to
support him failed to show up:
The whole coup attempt was run within a 500 x 200 meter corridor with nothing of
significance happening outside of it. A dangerous propaganda stunt but so far nothing more
than that.
This slight modification of the Guaidó/López picture above seems
appropriate. These dudes are mere comic figures, wannabe fantasy heroes.
One would have thought that such a comical failure would have put an end to similar schemes
of 'western' supported regime change attempts.
Unfortunately it didn't.
In June 2020 it
became obvious that a U.S. directed color revolution was planned to unseat the President
Lukashenko of Belarus. It happened
as usual after the election results were put into doubt. But just a few days later it became
obvious that the
attempt had failed :
While President Alexander Lukashenko claimed to have won 80% of the votes during last
Sunday's election, the 'western' candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya claimed that she had won.
(While the 80% is certainly too high it is most likely that Lukashenko was the real winner.)
Protests and riots ensued. On Tuesday Tikhanovskaya was told in no uncertain terms to leave
the country. She ended up in Lithuania.
Lukashenko then proceeded to make a deal with Russia which promised him protection in
exchange for progress in the creation of a Russian-Belarus Union State.
Even the NATO lobby-shop Atlantic Council
admitted that the coup attempt had failed:
The author rightly concludes:
[T]he resistance of the Lukashenka regime is strengthening by the day. With Russia now
seemingly standing firmly behind Lukashenka, photogenic rallies and patchy strike action
will not be enough to bring about historic change.
It is over. The 'patchy strikes' were never real industrial actions. A few journalist of
the Belarus state TV went on a strike. They were unceremoniously fired and replaced with
Russian journalists. A few hundred workers at the MTZ Minsk Tractor Works did a walk out. But
MTZ has 17,000 employees and the 16,500+ who did not walk out know very well why they still
have their jobs. Should Lukashenko fall it is highly likely that their state owned company
will be sold off for pennies and immediately 'right sized' meaning that most of them would be
out of work. During the last 30 years they have seen that happen in every country around
Belarus. There have no urge to experience that themselves.
On Monday the leader of the earlier MTZ walk out, one Sergei Dylevsky,
was arrested while he agitated for more strikes. Dylevsky is a member of the
self-proclaimed Coordination Council of the opposition which demands negotiations over the
presidency. Other members of the council have been called in for questioning by state
investigators over a criminal case against the council.
Meanwhile the rather hapless opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who falsely
claimed to have won the election, is in Lithuania. She is supposed to be an English teacher
but has difficulties reading the English text begging (vid) for 'western' support. She
has already met various 'western' politicians including the General Secretary of the German
Christian Democratic Union party of chancellor Angela Merkel, Peter Zeimiag, and the U.S.
Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun. Neither will be able to help her.
Despite her obvious lack of popular support Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, like Juan
Guaidó in Venezuela, was urged to make another attempt. Two weeks ago she had the
chutzpah of giving Lukashenko
an ultimatum to resign :
Belarus's exiled opposition leader on Tuesday gave strongman President Alexander Lukashenko a
deadline of two weeks to resign, halt violence and release political prisoners, warning he
would otherwise face a crippling general strike.
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who maintains she was the true winner of an August 9 election,
issued what she said was a "people's ultimatum", demanding Lukashenko quit power by October
25 and halt the "state terror" unleashed by authorities against peaceful protesters.
"If our demands are not met by October 25, the whole country will peacefully take to the
streets," she said in a statement released in Lithuania, where she is currently based in
exile after leaving Belarus following the election.
"And on October 26 a nationwide strike will begin at all enterprises, all roads will be
blocked, and sales at state stores will collapse ," she said. "You have 13 days."
On October 25 there was indeed another medium sized protest in Minsk. But those who
participated were again the upper middle class and better off people, not the industry workers
and farmers who make up the majority of the Belarusian people.
"Today, the people's strike begins – the next step for Belarusians towards freedom, an
end to violence and new elections," Tikhanovskaya said on Monday. "Belarusians know that the
main task on 26 October is to show that nobody will work for the regime."
However, despite the sight of large columns of protesters in the streets again – and
the sense that the protest has regained some of the momentum it has lost in recent weeks
– there was no sign of significant numbers of workers at state-controlled plants
joining the strike for any sustained length of time.
...
At the Minsk tractor factory, one of the big plants that are the pride of Lukashenko's
neo-Soviet economy, most workers appeared to be clocking on as normal for the Monday morning
shift. The leader of an earlier strike at the factory in August was forced to flee the
country under pressure from authorities, and many workers fear reprisals for striking. At
most, some workers briefly expressed support for the protest before or after their shifts,
but did not actually refuse to work.
A few hundred students at some university skipped their classes and walked in the streets.
But the workers kept working. No roads were blocked. The shop traffic was normal.
The workers in the state owned industries know very well that most of them will become
jobless and poor should the 'western' supported neo-liberal opposition gain power in Belarus.
Everything would be privatized for pennies and 'right-sized' by mass layoffs. They have seen
that happen again and again in each of their neighboring countries.
Juan Guaido declared a coup without having made sure that the soldiers he expected would
show up. The soldiers knew that it was not in their interest to follow him.
Svetlana Guaidoskaya declared a general strike without understanding that the workers she
called on are nor interested in her neo-liberal schemes. That she, or her handlers, even
attempted to urge for a strike shows how little they understand the real concerns the workers
have.
Belarus, like Venezuela, has a government and system that is supported by the majority of
its people. Neither country can be regime changed without a military intervention from abroad.
That will not be coming anytime soon.
Posted by b on October 27, 2020 at 14:32 UTC |
Permalink
They can't spare some changes to entice the workers like they did in Hong Kong ?
div> All Belorussians have to do is look over their shoulders at the
nazi-infested bandit state and economic basket case that Ukraine has become. I doubt even the
starry-eyed, pro-American Belorus middle classes are that stupid.
All Belorussians have to do is look over their shoulders at the nazi-infested bandit state
and economic basket case that Ukraine has become. I doubt even the starry-eyed, pro-American
Belorus middle classes are that stupid.
Well, well, that might all be true, but what progress is the Russian-Belarusian union state
making? How does Lukashenko plan to deal with the economic problems of Belarus? Is Russia
going to deliver oil and gas with a heavy discount again?
Wouldn't it be a lot easier for the corporate titans to just right a check for whatever
resource they want? So what if they must pay some taxes or abide by a few rules. Isn't Bill
Brwoder's cheapness and Mikhail Khodorkovsky's rule breaking the reason we are wasting all
our resources on Eastern Europe so as to surround Russia? Guess looking at the kick back Joe
Biden got thru Hunter Biden, I'm being naive. Since Lukashenko gave some of the best Covid
advice about getting outside (Vitamin D), here's rooting for him.
The Venezuelan super hero of your picture spent over a year in the Spanish embassy in
Caracas, diplomatic asylum is and old tradition that the British stepped and spit upon with
Assange, for years in small quarters, nothing like a tropical embassy with swimming pool and
all the comforts plus Mediterranean larder and cellar. The coup inspirer is out of Venezuela
as if the proud owner of a flying carpet, Arabian nights style. I was so indignant, Assange
is someone who gave the world an incredible gift, true free information, treated like a
pariah, and an upper crust imperial satrap risking the lives of many and causing a lot more
just for power and empire is free to come and go. No MSM comments on that analogy.
The best and more concise name for the Belarus regime changer was coined by Lukashenko,
Guaidikha, multiple meanings in a short word, compared with Tikhanovkaya.
A re post of what i wrote today on the open thread:
This a.m. (Oct 27) on NPR's broadcasting of the BBC World Service, there was a brief news
report on matters Belarusian. The London based program person spoke with a female "reporter"
in Minsk. The short discussion concerned the Strikes called for by Tikhanovskaya.
The protests not having produced the goods (removal of Lukashenko and the installation of
the female NATO-western puppet Tikhanovskaya) so onto strikes especially of the state owned
industries plus small businesses...This reporter said - without prodding - that the strikers
will be paid - from the "Solidarity Fund." Hmmm. Interesting and fully in keeping with
skeptical thinking about this whole situation. Then, to top it off and underscore one's need
for the deepest skepticism about the veracity of and indigenous roots of the effort at
removing Lukashenko, the London end closed with the "credentials" of the Minsk based
"reporter": not only a "reporter" but a worker in the Atlantic Council....
Of course, this being a color revolution target country, any and all violent means used by
the police etc to stop the protests/strikes is blared abroad on NPR/BBC. And continuing calls
for Lukashenko to remove himself from the presidency - accompanied by "look at how he and his
"regime" treat the population."
Now one might ask WHERE was similar outrage across the MSM and EU/UK/USA (accompanied by
western calls for the removal of Macron) throughout 2019 and the extreme brutality the French
Riot Police meted out on the Gilets Jaunes protestors (who weren't asking for Macron to go,
just some taxes and similar social spending efforts). Those protests were by and large
peaceful (there were black dressed, masked infiltrators who did damage and who gave the
Gilets jaunes some bad press). The Police were anything but - numerous protestors lost eyes,
hands and had serious damage to their jaws because of the stun grenades used.
Of course the aim is to scoop up the last stretch of Russia's western borderlands into
NATO hands. Meanwhile some similar efforts continue along Russia's more southerly borders.
Why can't we just let other countries alone? Mind our own business and take care of our own
societies, peoples? (Not a serious question 'cos I know that it is all about US global
dominance and $$$$$ for the western corporate-capitalist-imperialist ruling
This is so offensive to working class people. Do these middle class slimeballs in the US
State Department think all they have to do is shout from a high enough soapbox and workers
will obey? That's not how labor organization and strikes work! Some dilettante who has never
even been in a factory before cannot bypass all of the hard work of organizing and proving
herself to the workforce to command workers as if they are her personal army! The workers are
not just extras in some Hollywood creation that the few in the capitalist mass media
spotlight are starring in. They don't show up for your casting calls just because you want
them to.
The level of ignorant delusion in these people is staggering, and the utter contempt they
have for workers is infuriating.
A very appropriate article by B and very timely too.
As for Belarus as a projected terror territory -- be it a subject or an object:
In the 2013 atteck Friday evening blast on the Central government (Prime ministers office,
Ministries of Justice, Finance and Oil) and the following massacre (probably by several
gunmen) on the Summer club gathering of hundreds of members of the Lapour Party's youth
('Jugentstaffel der Arbeiter'/Arbeidernes ungdomsfylking), the official story contained a
claim that ABB (Anders Behring Breivik) had honed his gunman skills at a pay-for boot camp in
Bielarus. The prosecution offered photoes of his passport pages containing stamps of entries
from and exits from Poland as proof.
Now, in Poland, the central camp for training North American mercanEries lies very close ti
Poland's border with Bielorus. More likely he was trained, conditioned, duped and set up
there, I would surmise.
Do any of Y'all in the community of followers of B's writings on this blog have any
additional snippets of information about any "lóne wolves" stemming from those
forested marshes?
RSVP!
Sorry I forgot:
The Summer of 2013 two attacks on Labour Party Prime Minister's office and the "Fasces di
junessi lavorati" happened in NORWAY whilst the current leader of low-life secretaries of
NATO in Brussels, Jens Stoltenberg, was prime minister of Norway. He immediately declared
(two days later" that "I personally assume responsibility for all things that went wrong two
days ago".
Of course he had to relocate to Brussels.
His father, one Thorvald Stoltenberg, had been Foreign minister of Norway some years before
Jens assumed the premiership. He was a snitch who during the fifties provided the US with
lists of who among the members of his soscialist students' movement and amongst youths and
adults in his Labour Party might have commie sumpathies and thus should not be allowed into
The United States of (North) America.
Jens followed up by becoming a false hippie whilst in High School and reporting who amongst
his fellow hippies dealt in and smoked hashis. Also, as leader of the Youth movement was
opposed to Norwegian membership in NATO and the EU and for prohibition of nuclear weapons:
"Plus ca changes, plus ce reste la meme chose" amongst the priviledged families of the labour
aristocrazies.
Kyrgyzstan was also omitted. The Neoliberals will try again in Moldova; their disruptive
activities in Azerbaijan and Armenia are getting a lot of people killed but won't change
either government's political-economy. Moon still seems secure in RoK. Thailand is having a
struggle few have mentioned, but Malaysia seems to have overcome its attempted
destabilization. So, it appears the Eurasian Bloc has repelled the latest concerted attempt
at further destabilization by the Outlaw US Empire, but we know it will double-down since it
has no other policy choices regardless the POTUS.
I was in the capital of Moldova about 18 months ago and there were a large number of very
sinister billboards standing beside many of the roads saying "FREE, EXPERT ADVICE. CONTACT
THE U.S.EMBASSY." I kid not.
Now the intel agencies and their plutocrat bosses are attempting a color revolution in the
U.S.
div> let's not celebrate prematurely. The West/USA/NATO can wait a long
time. Lukashenko will eventually have to go, same as Maduro and Putin. Assad too. That's what
the West is counting on; in the meantime, they can groom a candidate, give them money, create
him out of nothing and eventually via their influence get him into power. That is what The West
for example is trying to do in Syria, they want to get a defacto leader in Eastern Syria can
will eventually challenge Assad in general elections. Look what happened in Chile under
Pinochet; the West had NO problem whatsoever with Pinochet being a dictator. Same as Franco in
Spain. For all their blabbering about "democracy" and "freedom" the West doesnt care if THEIR
people are in power without democracy and freedom. Remember what Reagan said: yeah, he is SOB
but he is OUR SOB.
The ONLY way to endure fakers will not be allowed in is for a general revolution, the way Cuba
did.
let's not celebrate prematurely. The West/USA/NATO can wait a long time. Lukashenko will
eventually have to go, same as Maduro and Putin. Assad too. That's what the West is counting
on; in the meantime, they can groom a candidate, give them money, create him out of nothing
and eventually via their influence get him into power. That is what The West for example is
trying to do in Syria, they want to get a defacto leader in Eastern Syria can will eventually
challenge Assad in general elections. Look what happened in Chile under Pinochet; the West
had NO problem whatsoever with Pinochet being a dictator. Same as Franco in Spain. For all
their blabbering about "democracy" and "freedom" the West doesnt care if THEIR people are in
power without democracy and freedom. Remember what Reagan said: yeah, he is SOB but he is OUR
SOB.
The ONLY way to endure fakers will not be allowed in is for a general revolution, the way
Cuba did.
NATO's stooges in Minsk could have taken the time to find a flag that wasn't used by Nazi
collaborators, too. I guess the success they had with Libya and Ukraine, they probably felt
confident about showing their hand.
Thanks so much for covering this B.The only other source I have is the Atlantic Council
aligned Democracy Now, which has been an R2P shill outlet since 2011.
@Oū Sī/區司/Tŭ Lèi'fū | Oct 27 2020 16:59 utc | 9
You have the year wrong. It was 22. July 2011
Stoltenberg immediately promised "more democracy". I interpreted it as "more of the same",
and I wasn't wrong. What happened that day was not what it seemed.
b, that picture sure is nice humor on comical clowns such as Guiado/Lopez. You also said:
One would have thought that such a comical failure would have put an end to similar
schemes of 'western' supported regime change attempts.
Unfortunately it didn't.
It didn't, because it needn't! Shenanigans through the use of props such as
Guaido/Poroshanko cost the Evil Empire practically nothing--just a few bucks into the hands
of stupid puppets who happen to be effective mouthpieces in the target nations with rather
low IQ and brainwashed over the years of the Empire's soft power. If they succeed,
hallelujah; if they don't, how would it hurt?
This is one of the remaining advantage that the 'West' still holds due to their previous
70 years of accumulative dominance over the rest of the world. The average person in the
world is, well, average and easily fooled. Easily fooled at least once or twice, that is.
This advantage of the 'West' is slowly being consumed, depleted, and losing efficacy. In a
year or two, after this pandemic passes and the scores on pandemic performances added up,
we'll see this kind of western hat trick gone with the wind.
@Posted by: Oū Sī/區司/Tŭ Lèi'fū | Oct 27 2020 17:25
utc | 10
Well, he seems what here is known as un chivato , the lowest rank of a human
kind...being a revolutionary the higuest, which awards being graduated as man/woman (
parphrasing Che )...
I did not know this dishonourable, and low amongst the possible lowest, past, of
denouncing own ( alleged ) comrades, and ruining in passing the lifes of so young people, but
any time I have seen this guy at G7/G-Whatever meetings he shows that expression of scared
servile lap dog...
Lacking any other merits, he probably could not find other means to keep the privileges of
his dinasty.
His case as a proof that anybody holding such high offices in Brusels have a complete
wardrobe of corpses hided anywhere...
Those who tried to go the opposite way, and be really labor, and even human, or a bit
fair, are died...prematurely...Palme, Hamarskjold, Moro, come to mind...
"What happened that day was not what it seemed.
Elaborate, please. What do you mean?"
Posted by: H.Schmatz | Oct 27 2020 19:38 utc | 18
I would venture a guess and say he meant that what really happened in Oslo and
Utøya is still untold.
To many coincidences and a narrative that is not allowed to be doubted.
Why did the early messages say several shooters?
Why have NO mobile videos from Utøya been released? (NO, not privacy)
I can go on like that for ages but you get my drift i hope.
My impression of Hong Kong is that it was students protesting, not workers.
Posted by: c1ue | Oct 27 2020 19:01 utc | 15
Your impression is correct but hardly the truth. Because students are able to produce
English signs, jockey the social media and most importantly, being photogenic for western
media consumption; they are just the most visible part of the campaign. You know, save the
children and all that psyops bs.
An obscene amount of money were handed out to participants, be it cash or supermarket
vouchers, amounts varies from 80usd a day for old folks just to show up to more than 1500usd
for taking point on violence against police.
lysias@13 wrote "Now the intel agencies and their plutocrat bosses are attempting a color
revolution in the U.S."
One of the cardinal strategies in petty bourgeois democratic upheavals/Gene Sharp style
regime change is denying the legitimacy of the election, then using the superior social
resources (and/or foreign financing) to make the streets ungovernable, staying in the streets
because the core support doesn't have to go to work. A swell of outrage over police violence
is more or less like catching a bus, one will come along sooner or later.
The number one person talking up fraud is Donald Trump. And the hard core of his
supporters are people with higher incomes. Even his militia types are property owners or have
a high enough income to buy expensive weapons to play with. True popular upsurges are always
hampered by the lack of arms. And of course the big media advertisers who invest in the right
wing media like Fox etc. aren't the barefoot masses either.
Thus if there is a color revolution being engineered in the US, it is Trump's. Except of
course cranks* who believe in the Deep State pretend black is white and it's the mythical foe
of the Deep State, Trump, who is the victim, instead of the perpetrator. Calling black,
white...You don't get more Trumpery than that.
*Deep State theory is fake left ideology created by people whose deep grained
anticommunism drives them to forego a rational analysis of the state and class and the
dictatorship of the bourgeoisie aka constintutional democracy, aka a republic not a
democracy, aka limited government with a free market, aka too many stupid phrases to
remember. Reality is Marxist, so denying Marxism is the True Derangement Syndrome.
thanks also @6 paco for the comments.... and @ 7 anne.. your example of the yellow vests
and how that was processed is very good.. there are a lot of double standards at work, but no
where is it more clearly seen then how that was processed... the msm turned a complete blind
eye to it, but we are supposed to believe all these other demonstrations are all so
legitimate.. it is laughable, but it is ongoing as others note... when it ends - i have no
idea... it seems like we are headed towards a world of more confusion and mayhem... that is
what it looks like to me at this point...
@H.Schmatz | Oct 27 2020 19:38 utc | 18
I don't want to hijack this thread, so I am going to post only these lines and leave it. I
know the two areas (In particular, I knew someone who worked in the government building and I
visited the exact site of the explosion many times before it happened). The government wanted
to demolish and rebuild, but wasn't allowed to. There is no actual proof that Breivik was
near the government buildings that day, only an extremely distorted image of someone in a
police uniform and with a full helmet on.
I personally heard the explosion from 30km away. There are videos of strange people
vacating the government area in Oslo just after the explosion, and also a person changing
clothes right after the explosion, only 15m from the explosion site (see bottom link).
Some of the victims look like actors with pieces of wood sticking out of their heads.
At the Utøya camp the labour party youth had banners advocating boycott of Israel
the days before. There were several reports of multiple shooters, but these reports
disappeared and somehow a single person killed 69 individuals, after single handedly
demolishing several government buildings and driving for 45 minutes to Utøya. The
photo of the alleged shooter taken by the police on the day does not look much like Breivik
later. There was a police exercise on the day with very similar scenario to what actually
happened, but the police made a spectacular mess of the actual event.
Stoltenberg was Prime Minister and declared July 24 2011 "Vårt svar er mer
demokrati, mer åpenhet og mer humanitet" ("Our answer is more democracy, more openness
and more humanity"). Still, the event was used by the media to close down public debates, the
main paper Aftenposten closed the main debate forum in the country the very same day.
Stoltenberg and the labour party won the election only 6 weeks later. He became head puppet
of NATO 1. October 2014.
Posted by: H.Schmatz | Oct 27 2020 19:52 utc | 20: "Those who tried to go the opposite way,
and be really labor, and even human, or a bit fair, are died...prematurely...Palme,
Hamarskjold, Moro, come to mind..."
Posted by: DougDiggler | Oct 27 2020 19:13 utc | 16
I would think a lot of Belarussians are familiar with this movie. I can't see how the
majority of Belarussians wanting anything to do with protests that display this rag. Only the
descendants of those who supported the Nazi's would. Almost 2 million Belarussians died
during the war, or about 20% of the population. Belarussians know their history. The idiots
in the west don't and can't help themselves using neo-nazis in their quest to overthrow
governments not just in eastern Europe, but around the world. The west didn't defeat Nazism,
they became it.
Thus if there is a color revolution being engineered in the US, it is Trump's.
by: steven t johnson @ 24 Trumpy does nothing without Netanyohu.. and Netanyohu does nothing
without London.. bankers and wall street thumpers ..
Tarrant had contacts with far-right groups in eastern Europe. If you know something about
the history of far-right extremist groups in eastern Europe going back to World War II, and
the adventures of Stepan Bandera after the war, you probably can put two and two together on
what and who Tarrant got up to in his own odyssey and get five as your answer.
The driving distance between the two mosques (one is in Riccarton suburb, the other in
Linwood suburb) is roughly about 12 - 16 minutes.
Most of his passengers figured out who he was straight away and censored themselves. So
much for trying to travel around Oslo incognito at the last minute when you think you might
not have public support. You have to wonder what Stoltenberg had been drinking at the time to
come up with such a hare-brained idea. Did he not have enough to do just before the
elections?
Color revolutions are so passe with the US failing in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Belarus.
Perhaps the US should consider returning to diplomacy in its foreign policy; if the state
department remembers how!
Thanks to the Norwegian comrades? fro the info, another path for reserach...
@Jen,
Always be suspicious of familiar sagas, by stadistic rules, It is no possible that, out of
fair competition and equal opportunities, a father being minister is succeded by a son in a
similar or even higuest office...Think of the Bushes...and attention to the Trumps...by
reading the other day about the Trump dinasty it seems that Donald jr., is the new darling of
the Republican Party...He just has hook with the masses with whom he mimetized better that
The Donald, father... Watching images of this guy, with such a troubled background in harsh
competition with the Biden jr, I got to worry that may be another will come who will make The
Donald father good...His expression and eyes show great reserves of resentment, always in
competition and feeling diminished by Ivanka...
Beware that this moron do not become the next Hitler even surpassing his father in rage and
fury...
Stoltenberg is just a model...you could put a robot instead of him and nobody will
notice..well, may be not so farfetched..and we could witness a next NATO Gen.Sec.who is a
cyborg...The Great Reset will bring in many surprises...as that old commenter used to say,
seatbelts may prove innefective...
"NATO's stooges in Minsk could have taken the time to find a flag that wasn't used by Nazi
collaborators, too." DougDiggler@16
The descendants of Nazi collaborators, often expatriates brought up in North America
within communities dominated by Hitler loyalists, form the core community for these colour
'revolutions.' They did so in Ukraine, they did in Yugoslavia and they do in Poland and
Hungary. They did in Vietnam too, where the collaborators were armed to fight the communists,
and in Korea where the collaborators were organised by the US to resist the national
revolution. It was not the British Empire but that of the Axis powers that the US took over
and turned into its agents.
In every country in western Europe the collaborators carried on-fighting communists for
capitalism.
@Lucci #1
My impression of Hong Kong is that it was students protesting, not workers.
Posted by: c1ue | Oct 27 2020 19:01 utc | 15
Yes those are jobless students or part timers but they do get paid perhaps more than what
they made in day to day basis. It's the reason why many of them can afford to protest for
months (some with throwaway clothes and mask even). Workers don't make much in day wage and
the younger one wouldn't feel the need to preserve for their retirement (if they even have
them) if they do in fact make more money protesting than they do in working chances are they
would be out protesting. Of course there's also the difference in their judicial system and
law enforcement which made more fear factor in comparison to HK.
Still i think they don't spend their resources just as much as they did in HK or even
Venezuela on this one.
Posted by: c1ue | Oct 27 2020 19:01 utc | 15 -- "My impression of Hong Kong is that it was
students protesting, not workers."
Wrong impression, friend.
Doesn't matter if they were students or workers. They were mainly paid rioters, not
"protestors".
Still, many believe the West's MSM when they breathlessly shout "students
protesting..."
Ask the other millions and millions of Hong Kong people who did not protest nor riot, and
they will tell you those black-clad youth in skinny pants were plainly and simply paid
cockroaches. Just like the "antifa" in the USofA.
We are talking about in the main here, so please save your time, and do not split hairs
with me.
Actually most if not all of the real students aren't paid. They were too blind, clueless
and easily led into amy movement with democracy on the box.
They were bombarded by teachers projecting their personal political views in "discussion
sessions" where they were shown subjective documentaries and then pseudo close-ended anti
govt questions and views were asked and "discussed", in a peer pressure echo chamber called a
classroom.
This happened in classes as young as P4 or year 4, these are 10 years old children we're
talking about.
For a culture that the wisdom and benevolence of a teacher is generally revered and
unquestioned. This is just pure child abuse. They were grooming child soldiers.
Guido, Tikhanovskaya, Joshua Wong.... these sad idiots -- people with more ambition than they
have brains for -- find that once they enter, they can never leave the grasp of Western
colour-revolution "experts".
If the colour revolution succeeds, they will be used and abused until they are no more
useful, whereupon, they will be arkancided, and the blame pinned on some enemy of the West
(making best use of invested resources, silencing a potential whistleblower).
If the colour revolution fails, the West waits for another better time (they regime change
some other nation), or they arkancide the sad idiots to restart another colour revolution
(costs them nothing to shoot an useless idiot).
Meanwhile, if the sad idiots show a change of heart, they will still be arkancided (for
knowing too much by then), and the blame pinned on some enemy of the West (same idiot, same
ends).
Like making a deal with Satan, they can enter, but can never leave.
Also like to add your other points are right on and this whole saga would not have
happened if it wasn't for the pressitutes "confirming" and reprinting the highly inflated
protest numbers and thereby indirectly supporting the colour revolution early in the piece.
One can still do an aerial analysis of the pictures and can easily see the 2m protest was
total horse manure.
This fact or lesson learnt is not lost on Belarus and Thailand. They are much better in
controlling bs and much more effort is now paid to show and push images of how much smaller
the protests are than claimed by the opposition.
With how things are going in Bolivia and Chile vs. things going in Belarus, HK and Thailand,
we can almost see that one new order is rising, and it's not the US.
Just had a look at the Tikhanovskaya video you link to. It's had 3300 views. I assume 1000
are the US congressmen and senators who are going to vote her into power, and the other two
thirds are readers of this blog.
Posted by: geoff chambers | Oct 28 2020 9:53 utc | 49
No, Geoff, not me.
The other 1/3rd are "reliably reported" to be from the 17 US agencies who are looking for
lame excuses to make up more "intelligence" to start colour revolutions.
The last third are "highly likely" to be Western MSM who need to pretend to know the bare
minimum on what is going down so they they can make up more "news".
Finally, US congressmen and senators do not need facts to vote, just cash, preferably of
the Basement Biden "plausibly deniable" sort, but martha's vineyard mansions might do
too.
I wonder about 3 things: First, could Biden win but be delegitimized by a scandal involving
China - similar to the Trump-Russia narrative?
Second, Venezuela may patch together some sort of election. Do US/vassals keep Guiado as
President with no real position?
Third, Yes the West can wait for Russia/Belarus etc to fall - while their nations decay.
Lithuania is a horrific example of Russophobia over everything else. They will be nursing
homes surrounded by forest. And looking at US history, no amount of riots will stop foreign
aggression (as with Vietnam). Even the Confederacy dreamed of conquering Cuba and South
America !!
Anne
@7 ,That the strikers will be paid - from the "Solidarity Fund."
That is quite the admission. How does US/NATO launder money and get it into Belarus?
Drying up that well would do wonders to stop color revolutions. Perhaps banning foreign NGO's
helps do this and why Russia did this almost a decade ago.
-Yes, one election coming, foreign observers called in, plenty excuses for their not coming,
then MSM presstitute claims of fraud and rapid street rioting - all with signs of long
prepared
planning - supported by US media.
I am confident that now the Chilean new constituents in 2021 will legally block the way for
this trickery and especially for any lawfare manipulations in the future.
Eighthman @51: "I wonder about 3 things: First, could Biden win but be delegitimized by a
scandal involving China - similar to the Trump-Russia narrative?"
That would defeat the purpose of getting Biden elected in the first place. The empire
desperately needs to reestablish its legitimacy, so the "Mighty Wurlitzer" absolutely
will not go on a rampage against Biden like they did with Trump. The empire needs the global
community to go back to solemnly nodding in agreement whenever the US establishment claims
that America must bomb another country for its own good.
"Second, Venezuela may patch together some sort of election. Do US/vassals keep Guiado as
President with no real position?"
Venezuela's electoral process is one of the very cleanest and most transparent on Earth.
No "patching together" required. That said, the empire will keep Guaido around only so
long as they think there is some value left in him, even if that value is only for CIA goons
to murder him and crank up the "Mighty Wurlitzer" to say
it was Maduro who did the deed. Of course, the word of the empire and its mass media needs to
count for something again in order for that to work, and that requires Biden as president and
a uniform chorus from the mass media painting him as honorable.
"Third, Yes the West can wait for Russia/Belarus etc to fall - while their nations
decay..."
Well, that is why many of the western elites are desperately embracing the ridiculous
fantasy of the "Great Reset" without any idea of how to make such a thing happen.
Posted by: William Gruff | Oct 28 2020 13:41 utc | 55
DNC or the left can sabotage Trump and his administration because they already well
entrenched not because deep state favored them. Now that Trump and Republicans seems to be
successful in installing their own pick at the high offices i do think Biden presidency being
sabotaged back is possible.
If Republicans see an opportunity to delegitimise Biden, I think they will take it. Of
course, the Big Media will ignore corruption - until they can't. Kamala has already said
Coney isn't legit. Partisanship above all else.
The funniest thing about a Biden victory will be social justice "comedians" falling over a
cliff - not having a simple Trump punching bag to riff off of. What will Colbert, Samantha B.
and Amber Ruffin have to bore us about? It's going to be dull, dull, dull...
The Dims and Repugs are both on the same team. The only reason they all freaked out over
Trump's win in 2016 is because Trump was clearly deliberately selected to play the foil
against Clinton and make her look good in comparison. Everyone, including Republicans, and
even Trump himself, expected Trump to lose. Trump's upset victory cracked the establishment's
confidence in their ability to control election outcomes. It also shook their confidence in
their understanding of what was going on in the heads of the American people. They couldn't
accept that a political toddler could beat seasoned professionals at their own game, and they
still cannot accept that the American people might have minds of their own and hate being
manipulated, so much so that they will intentionally vote for a candidate that they know they
are not supposed to vote for.
Biden's election will return things to predictability for the establishment, so they won't
attack him.
Yes, wasn't it? And believe me, didn't hear another word either from that "reporter" or
that she was linked into the Atlantic Council nor anything more about that "Solidarity Fund"
(essentially buying off those workers willing to "strike"). The Beeb probably realized they'd
let a little too much out of the bag...
@karlof1:
Kyrgyzstan was not omitted as Pepe Escobar explains in his latest article, the very effective
Russian counter coup immediately neutralized US's plans and NGO:s and US even admitted
defeat. The western hipster revolution in Belarus will run out of steam and even Pashniyans
velvet revolution in Armenia will eventually be rolled back since Armenians discovered that
the only reason they still exist and are not yet fully exterminated by a Turkish final
solution, is Russia, not the Kardashians and not their American puppet masters who hasn't
lifted a finger for them.
"... Same principle with speaking engagements. Nobody in the corporate world seriously believed that listening to a speech from Hillary Clinton was worth $200,000 - especially when she sometimes kept getting these gigs at the same company every few months: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-03/every-hillary-and-bill-clinton-speech-2013-fees ..."
"... Furthermore, the book sales conduit adds an extra degree of separation between the ultimate source of the money and the recipient of the money. Somebody who wants to buy a politician could for example donate money to an NGO that does "political education" and buys political books to distribute to people, and that NGO buys the copies of the corrupt politician's book in bulk. ..."
Learned here on SST that a lot of the huge book contracts given to swampies are a form of
money laundering. I have long tried to figure out how the publishing companies could afford to
pay yuudge advances for ghost written books in a country where so few people read much of
anything any longer. Simple answer! Big money people order yuudge numbers of books in advance
so that the publisher is assured a profit.
I think it was the previous mayor of Baltimore who got a multi-million dollar windfall
from her best-selling children's book. I wonder how many kids actually read it.
Lots of trucks out with their flags here, people are becoming optimistic here in South
Florida, feels almost normal here.
Trump taking New York would be the ultimate, lets hope. I'm looking forward to watching
CNN's Wolf Blitzer on election night, it's been 4 years for me and CNN. I just want to see
him squirm.
it looks a lot less like corruption when a politician receives money because he wrote an
"inspiring book" that seemingly sells lots of copies than when he receives money outright for
political favors.
Furthermore, the book sales conduit adds an extra degree of separation between the
ultimate source of the money and the recipient of the money. Somebody who wants to buy a
politician could for example donate money to an NGO that does "political education" and buys
political books to distribute to people, and that NGO buys the copies of the corrupt
politician's book in bulk.
Interesting question about book deals. Certainly it could be a channel to hide the names
of donors, which would seem the only rational reason to do so. I would guess the lecture
circuit a more appropriate way to do that. If I'm going to part with that much I'd at least
want a song for their dinner out of it.
The 10 biggest book deals have a mixture of celebrities, I can't imagine anyone wanting to
slip Bruce Springsteen $10 million under the table so it appears the publishers do make money
on these deals, counter-intuitive though it be.
Book writing can be far more lucrative than I ever thought possible. James Patterson got
150 million for a 17 book series. I would say he earned it although I've never read any of
his stuff. Michelle Obama's first book sold over 10 million copies and netted her at least 65
million in a deal for both her and Barrack's memoirs.
Ken Follett got 50 million for his trilogy.
Bill Clinton got 15 million for his book while George W. Bush only got 7 million for
his.
Hillary got 14 million for hers. Springsteen got 10 million for his autobiography.
Even Pope Jan Pavel II made a cool 8.5 million for his memoirs back in 1994. There are an
awful lot of 7 figure book advances out there.
Another phenomenon in the book world is the mass purchase of books by organizations. For
example the RNC bought $100K worth of Don Trump Jr's book and more than $400K worth of Sean
Hannity's latest. I'm sure the RNC is not alone in this practice.
By Caitlin Johnstone , an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her
website is here and you can follow
her on Twitter @caitoz The
US-centralized empire functions like a giant blob that absorbs nations and turns them into
imperial client states. Once absorbed, it is rare for a country to escape and rejoin other
genuinely sovereign nations.
The new president-elect of Bolivia, Luis Arce, has
told the Spanish international news agency EFE that he intends to restore the nation's
relations with Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. This reverses the policies of the US-backed coup
regime which immediately began
closing embassies ,
kicking out doctors and severing relations with those nations after illegally seizing power
last year.
Arce also spoke of warm relations with Russia and China.
"We are going to re-establish all relations," he told EFE. "This government has
acted very ideologically, depriving the Bolivian people of access to Cuban medicine, to Russian
medicine, to advances in China. For a purely ideological issue, it has exposed the population
in a way that is unnecessary and harmful."
Arce expressed a willingness to "open the door to all countries, the only requirement is
that they respect us and respect our sovereignty, nothing more. All countries, no matter the
size, who want a relationship with Bolivia, the only requirement is that we respect each other
as equals. If that is so, we have no problem."
If you know anything about US imperialism and global politics, you will recognize that last
bit as brazen heresy against imperial doctrine.
The unofficial doctrine of the empire-like cluster of international allies that is loosely
centralized around the United States does not recognize the sovereignty of other nations, much
less respect them as equals. This empire takes it as a given that it has every right to
determine what every nation in the world does, who their leaders will be, where their resources
will go, and what their military posture on the world stage will be. If a government refuses to
accept the empire's right to determine these things, it is targeted, sabotaged, attacked, and
eventually replaced with a puppet regime.
The US-centralized empire functions like a giant blob that slowly works to absorb nations
which have not yet been converted into imperial client states. It is rare that a nation is able
to escape from that blob and rejoin the unabsorbed nations like China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela
and Cuba in their fight for self-sovereignty, and it is encouraging that it was able to do
so.
We saw the dynamics of the imperial blob explained quite vividly last year by American
political analyst John Mearsheimer at a debate hosted by the Australian think tank Center for
Independent Studies. Mearsheimer told his audience that the US is going to do everything it can
to halt China's rise and prevent it from becoming the regional hegemon in the eastern
hemisphere, and that Australia should align with the US in that battle or else it would face
the wrath of Washington.
"The question that's on the table is what should Australia's foreign policy be in light
of the rise of China," Mearsheimer said .
"I'll tell you what I would suggest if I were an Australian."
Mearsheimer said China is going to continue to grow economically and will convert that
economic power into military power to dominate Asia "the way the US dominates the western
hemisphere," and explained why he think the US and its allies have every ability to prevent
that from happening.
"Now the question is what does this all mean for Australia?" Mearsheimer said.
"Well, you're in a quandary for sure. Everybody knows what the quandary is. And by the way
you're not the only country in East Asia that's in this quandary. You trade a lot with China,
and that trade is very important for your prosperity, no question about that. Security-wise,
you really want to go with us. It makes just a lot more sense, right? And you understand that
security is more important than prosperity, because if you don't survive, you're not gonna
prosper.
"Now some people say there's an alternative: you can go with China," said
Mearsheimer. "Right, you have a choice here: you can go with China rather the United States.
There's two things I'll say about that. Number one, if you go with China you want to understand
you are our enemy. You are then deciding to become an enemy of the United States. Because
again, we're talking about an intense security competition.
"You're either with us or against us," he continued. "And if you're trading
extensively with China, and you're friendly with China, you're undermining the United States in
this security competition. You're feeding the beast, from our perspective. And that is not
going to make us happy. And when we are not happy you do not want to underestimate how nasty we
can be. Just ask Fidel Castro."
Nervous laughter from the Australian think tank audience punctuated Mearsheimer's more
incendiary observations. The CIA is known to have made numerous attempts to assassinate
Castro.
If you've ever wondered how the the US is so successful in getting other nations around the
world to align with its interests, this is how. It's not that the US is a good actor on the
world stage or a kind friend to its allies, it's that it will destroy you if you disobey
it.
Australia is not aligned with the US to protect itself from China. Australia is aligned with
the US to protect itself from the US. As a Twitter follower recently observed , the US doesn't have
allies, only hostages.
As the recently released Palace Letters
illustrated, the CIA staged a coup to oust
Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam because he was prioritizing the nation's
self-sovereignty. Journalist John Pilger
wrote in 2014 after Whitlam's death:
Australia briefly became an independent state during the Whitlam years, 1972-75. An
American commentator wrote that no country had "reversed its posture in international affairs
so totally without going through a domestic revolution." Whitlam ended his nation's colonial
servility. He abolished royal patronage, moved Australia towards the Non-Aligned Movement,
supported "zones of peace" and opposed nuclear weapons testing.
The primary difference between the coup in Australia and the one in Bolivia was that the
Bolivians refused to
roll over and take it while we shrugged and said 'No worries mate.' We had every option to
become a real nation and insist on our own self-sovereignty, but we, unlike the Bolivians, were
too thoroughly propagandized and placid. Some hostages escape, some don't.
The US empire got rid of Whitlam, and then when we elected in 2007 a prime minister who was
considered too friendly with China they did it again; in order to facilitate the Obama
administration's "pivot" against Beijing the pro-China Kevin Rudd was replaced by the compliant Julia Gillard.
World Socialist Websitereports :
Secret US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks in December 2010 revealed that
"protected sources" of the US embassy were pivotal figures in Gillard's elevation. For months,
key coup plotters, including senators Mark Arbib and David Feeney, and Australian Workers Union
(AWU) chief Paul Howes, secretly provided the US embassy with
regular updates on internal government discussions and divisions within the leadership
Rudd had proposed an Asia-Pacific Community, attempting to mediate the escalating
strategic rivalry between the US and China, and opposed the formation of a quadrilateral
military alliance between the US, India, Japan and Australia, aimed against China.
Gillard, who had cultivated her pro-US credentials through Australia-US and
Australia-Israel leadership forums, was literally selected by the US embassy as a reliable
replacement to Rudd. In her first public appearance after knifing Rudd, she demonstrated her
devotion to Washington by posing for a photo op with the US ambassador, flanked by US and
Australian flags. She soon had a phone call with Obama, who had previously twice postponed a
planned visit to Australia under Rudd.
The centrality of Australia to the US preparations for war against China became apparent
in November 2011, when Obama announced his "pivot to Asia" in the Australian parliament, rather
than the White House. During the visit, Gillard and Obama signed an agreement to station
American Marines in Darwin and allow greater US access to other military bases, placing the
Australian population on the front line of any conflict with China.
Gillard's government also sanctioned the expansion of the major US spying and
weapons-targeting base at Pine Gap, agreed to the US military's increased use of Australian
ports and airbases, and stepped up Australia's role in the US-led top-level "Five Eyes" global
surveillance network, which monitors the communications and online activities of millions of
people worldwide.
Rudd's removal marked a turning point. US imperialism, via the Obama administration, sent
a blunt message: There was no longer any room for equivocation by the Australian ruling elite.
Regardless of which party was in office, it had to line up unconditionally behind the US
conflict with China, no matter what the consequences for the loss of its massive export markets
in China.
This is what we're seeing all around the world now: a slow
motion third world war being
waged by the US power alliance against the remaining nations which have resisted being
absorbed into it. As the most powerful of the unabsorbed nations by far, China
is the ultimate target of this war. If the empire succeeds in its ultimate goal of stopping
China, it will have attained a de facto planetary government which no population will be able
to oppose or dissent from.
I don't know about you, but I never consented to a world where powerful nuclear-armed forces
wave Armageddon weapons at each other while fighting for planetary domination and subverting
less powerful nations if they don't play along with their Cold War games. Detente and peace
must be sought and obtained, and we must all work to live together on this planet in
collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem.
This omnicidal, ecocidal way of living that the oligarchic empire has laid out for us does
not suit our species, and it will drive us to extinction along with God knows how many other
species if we do not find a way to end it. Rulers historically do not cede their power
willingly, so we ordinary human beings as a collective are going to have to find a way to
destroy their
propaganda engine, force an end to imperialism, and build a healthy world.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
It's me 14 hours ago The USA is just an
extension of that country we are not to criticize, which has been expanding their land base as
soon as they moved in. The USA is the strong arm that goes around to force other countries to
accept the terms and conditions of the country we are not allowed to criticize. Reply 31 Show 2
previous replies HakunaMatata It's me 5 hours ago True, and that's how Gillard got the tap,
however, the US has become extremely polarized and a house divided within itself cannot stand.
The illusion of democracy in Israel is also showing signs and symptoms of collapse. We should
also remember that Harold Holt was Australia's first political assassination. HH was Treasurer
at the time The Currency Act 1965 was passed which was a clear violation of the Australian
Constitution. As was the War Powers Act 1942. Chapter V, Clause 115: "A State shall not coin
money, nor make anything but gold and silver coin a legal tender in payment of debt." People
want to play politics and ignore the Law that governs every well organized society. Reply 3
neeon9 It's me 9 hours ago You mean Jews, the pestilence, the virus, the murderers of nurses
and children, the invaders of Palestine? I will criticize them! And the horse they rode in on,
the USA. The Jew the Englishman and the American. The axis of evil. Reply 14 Show 1 more
replies Crapiola 12 hours ago The US started out as a corporation of elite businessmen who
simply wanted King George's tariff and tax revenue as their own. I point to the Whiskey
Rebellion and Shay's rebellion as early proof of my assertion. Only the elite could vote, only
the elite could hold office. Nothing has changed much. Reply 11 Rocky_Fjord Crapiola 10 hours
ago Yep, Shay's Rebellion and James Madison's Constitution filtering out democracy of the
common man, defined the state. King George wanted no more expansion across the Appalachian
mountains, but the founders were land grabbers and Amerind killers at heart, and so the myth
and Monroe's Manifest Destiny began. Reply 9 Cabonnet 57 15 hours ago Things changed in
Australia after Thatcher came to power. Her friend and ally was Ronald Reagan . The USA started
showing of their warships in Sydney harbor. Were these friendly visit or was the USA telling
Australia they have new owners ? Reply 18 Zogg Cabonnet 57 13 hours ago It happened earlier
when in 1975 MI6 and CIA have made a coup d'etat in Australia and otherthrown the PM who
started to realize a plan to get independent from the US. Reply 17 1 Show 3 more replies
westernman Cabonnet 57 14 hours ago Yes the people cheered those idiots on, they were both very
stupid. They were both competing to show subservience to elites and corporate money and power.
They were both against well being of their respective societies and ordinary poor, middle class
and the workers. They sat the stage for what we're living today, a proto-fascist US and Britain
robbing their respective taxpayers on continuous basis. This a dare predict will be the
catalyst to their rapid downfall, there is no quiet way out for the global masses. Capitalism
must end before it ends all life on earth! Reply 19 Show 2 more replies Rocky_Fjord 10 hours
ago Examples of US reducing sovereign nations to vassal states -- and the filthy tactics used
-- are endless. Bill Blum wrote books about it. Yugoslavia is a prime example, and the story is
told in documentary film, The Weight of Chains, a version in English on YT. All nations are
subject to US hegemony in a strategy to encircle Russia and China, and one can see it in
present time. The CIA sends in the NGO's like NED [National Endowment for Democracy], they do
their dirty work organizing local operatives to protest and challenge elections and so on. If
that doesn't do the trick, then military force is used as in Yugoslavia, and against civilians
and infrastructure, leaving a wake of cancer and genetic mutation, birth defects . ... See more
Reply 13 straydog2 15 hours ago "America has no permanent friends or enemies, only
interests" -- Henry Kissinger. Though, to be fair, this applies to the vast majority of
countries. Reply 16 1 Cabonnet 57 straydog2 12 hours ago The USSR was a ally . Reply 2 Show 1
more replies Memo1 straydog2 14 hours ago "Friends" ??? You make me laugh. When does
imperialist and imperial powers have friends? Its the conquered and foes. Allies and friends
are just politically correct terms. In reality, it the conquered and remaining foes. Reply 6 1
Show 1 more replies westernman 14 hours ago "This omnicidal, ecocidal way of living that the
oligarchic empire has laid out for us does not suit our species". That statement is most
paramount to our planetary survival. Our planet is burning down and the US is worried about war
and military/economic domination. We the human kind cannot allow this mad US hegemony to
continue unopposed. We have to rid humanity of weapons of mass murder, think collectively in a
shared world with all humans and ecosystem coexisting in peace and harmony or parish in misery.
Reply 8 Pedro 15 hours ago Oh how poetically correct. The ilusion is the eye the brain the
perception. The germans are going to feel it big when merkle disagrees with the usa, n does not
delver gas, russia had not stopped the gas supply into ukraine, despite the 20 plus year of
unpaid gas bills pilling up, the bill is 1 million, they would only pay a third. Its bern like
that all the time. Twenty years of part payments do add up. Reply 9 zoombeenie 12 hours ago
Security concerns are a direct result of aggression and invasion. The US needs all the security
its war machine can provide. The answer to their problems and Australia's is not to create
enemies Reply 7 neeon9 zoombeenie 9 hours ago Without enemies the US will crumble even faster.
It is the M.I.C. that keeps the fiscal wheels turning. Without the constant dealing out of
death to all who dare to turn their backs on them, the US is over. They are without doubt the
most dangerous terrorist nation on the planet, I for one will not morn their passing. Reply 4
TheFishh 5 hours ago US wants to stop China? US still buys more from China than China buys from
the US. And China doesn't see those simply doing business with the US as enemies. US will not
succeed in stopping China. That time has passed, and in this global economy, countries can't
afford to turn their backs on trade and revenue. Besides, US doesn't have anything to offer
anymore other than fake promises of security and loans with a million strings attached. Reply 3
roby007 13 hours ago "America has no allies, only hostages" - so true.
Did some googling and I find it fascinating how much support the US State Department and
associated fake NGOs talk up this "Ecodefense" organization in Russia while ignoring,
dismissing, or criticizing activist environmental organizations that impact the empire's
profits.
Meanwhile record numbers of environmental activists have been murdered across Latin
America and the Philippines. Funny how the US State Department only complains about the CIA's
drug dealers getting snuffed in the Philippines!
This difference in response to persecution of activists in different places leads me to
strongly suspect that, like the drug dealers in the Philippines that the empire cries over,
certain environmental "NGOs" in Russia are tools of the empire.
Governments should closely watch all "NGOs" operating in their countries and
immediately arrest anyone from those organizations who are awarded a financial "literary
prize" or other laundered payment by obscure groups that are linked through any number of
intermediaries to the US State Department's fake "NGOs" . These groups that hand out
the payment from the empire are usually hazy publishing companies that have never published
anything, or at most create a quarterly newsletter with a distribution list of around five
people. Somehow these dubious "publishers" hand out quarter million dollar
"literary prizes" to pro-empire individuals whose writing sucks. A quarter $million
every couple years is more than enough to grow local fake "NGOs" to be used in future
"regime change operations" .
Furthermore, if the US State Department talks up an organization then that organization
is almost certainly an evil tool of empire.
"... Political collapse: obviously there wasn't really a functional government at all for a period of time in the nineties. Lots of American consultants running around and privatizing things in a fashion that created a lot of incredibly corrupt, super-rich oligarchs who then fled with their money, a lot of them. ..."
Welcome back to Turning Hard Times into Good Times. I'm your host Jay Taylor. I'm really
pleased to have with me once again Dmitry Orlov.
Dmitry was born and grew up in Leningrad, but has lived in the United States. He moved
here in the mid-seventies. He has since gone back to Russia, where he is living now.
But Dmitry was an eyewitness to the Soviet collapse over several extended visits to his
Russian homeland between the eighties and mid-nineties. He is an engineer who has contributed
to fields as diverse as high-energy Physics and Internet Security, as well as a leading Peak
Oil theorist. He is the author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American
Prospects (2008) and The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors' Toolkit (2013).
Welcome, Dmitry, and thank you so much for joining us again.
A: Great to be on your program again, Jay.
Q: It's really good to hear your voice. I know we had you on [the program] back in 2014.
It's been a long time -- way too long, as far as I'm concerned. In that discussion we talked
about the five stages of collapse that you observed in the fall of the USSR. Could you review
them really quickly, and compare them to what you are seeing, what you have witnessed and
observed in the United States as you lived here, and of course in your post now in
Russia.
A: Yes. The five stages of collapse as I defined them were financial, commercial,
political, social and cultural. I observed that the first three, in Russia. The finance
collapsed because the Soviet Union basically ran out of money. Commercial collapse because
industry, Soviet industry, fell apart because it was distributed among fifteen Soviet
socialist republics, and when the Soviet Union fell apart all of the supply chains broke
down.
Political collapse: obviously there wasn't really a functional government at all for a
period of time in the nineties. Lots of American consultants running around and privatizing
things in a fashion that created a lot of incredibly corrupt, super-rich oligarchs who then
fled with their money, a lot of them.
Surprisingly, social and cultural collapse didn't really get very far until Russia started
regaining its health. Some of the other Soviet socialist republics are in the throes of
full-on social and cultural collapse, but Russia avoided this fate.....
The goal of this movement is ending nation states to end their influence, laws and
regulations, and thus try to dynamite, through sowing divide ( and in this they are helped by
alleged opponent Soros and his network of franchises mastering regime change, color
revolutions
Blunt coups d´etat and lately "peaceful transitions of power", being both, Soros and
the NRx, connected to the CIA...)countries with which make what they call "The Mosaic" of
regions resulting, at the head of which there will be a corporation CEO and their stakeholders
in a hierarchical autocratic order. These people think that Democracy simply does not work and
thus must be finished, and that there are people ( white, of course ) who have developed a
higher IQ ( at this poin
t I guess some of you have noticed this creed sound very familiar to you, from our neighbors
here by the side at SST, where "james" and Pat lately love each other so much...) and must rule
over the rest.
To achieve their goals, these people, as geeks from Silicon Valley, are willing to cross the
human frontier to transhumanism so as to enhance their human capabilities to submit the
rest...
Wondering why this topic have never been treated at MoA...nor at the Valdai Discussion
Club...
The Alt-Right and the Europe of the Regions. According to Wikipedia, Steve Bannon is inspired
by the theorist Curtis Yarvin ( https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilustration_oscura),
who states that countries should be divided into feudal areas in the hands of corporations
(Patchwork).
"... When everything is fine, and the macro economic indicators are stable, various funds are building up their assets, consumption is on the rise and so on. In such times, you hear more and more that the state only stands in the way, and that a pure market economy would be more effective. But as soon as crises and challenges arise, everyone turns to the state, calling for the reinforcement of its supervisory functions. This goes on and on, like a sinusoidal curve. This is what happened during the preceding crises, including the recent ones, like in 2008. ..."
"... So, again, no model is pure or rigid, neither the market economy nor the command economy today, but we simply have to determine the level of the state's involvement in the economy. ..."
"... In the U.S., since 1980, money has increasingly become the source of political power. This is dictatorship. The U.S. has transformed itself from an imperfect democracy, into an almost perfect 'oligarchic dictatorship' where the corporations oversee the government, rather than the government overseeing the market. This is the very definition of fascism. And under such a system, the U.S.'s market economy has been transformed into an economy of serial monopolies. ..."
"... i continue to believe the planet is being screwed by big finance.. ..."
"... Very true jadan, your view on Putin, and every time I read an excerpt or a speech by him I notice he is far above our western "leaders" with their meaningless chatter and hollow phrases. ..."
Most of the commentators on yesterday's
post were right. It was the Russian President Vladimir Putin
who said this :
Many of us read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry when we were children and remember what the main character said:
"It's a question of discipline. When you've finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet. It's very tedious
work, but very easy."
I am sure that we must keep doing this "tedious work" if we want to preserve our common home for future generations. We must
tend our planet.
The subject of environmental protection has long become a fixture on the global agenda. But I would address it more broadly
to discuss also an important task of abandoning the practice of unrestrained and unlimited consumption – overconsumption – in
favour of judicious and reasonable sufficiency, when you do not live just for today but also think about tomorrow.
We often say that nature is extremely vulnerable to human activity. Especially when the use of natural resources is growing
to a global dimension. However, humanity is not safe from natural disasters, many of which are the result of anthropogenic interference.
By the way, some scientists believe that the recent outbreaks of dangerous diseases are a response to this interference. This
is why it is so important to develop harmonious relations between Man and Nature.
I found the excerpt remarkable because it included this, on might say, anti-capitalistic statement:
.. an important task of abandoning the practice of unrestrained and unlimited consumption – overconsumption – in favour of judicious
and reasonable sufficiency, when you do not live just for today but also think about tomorrow.
That 'green' statement will rile those people who argue for free markets and a right to sell bullshit in ever more flavors. In
their view the fight against such 'communists' thinking must be renewed.
As the full English transcript of Putin's speech and the two and a half hour Q&A
is now available I can also quote another interesting
passage where Putin talks about capitalism and the role of the state. His standpoint seems very pragmatic to me:
Question : Mr President, there has been much talk and debate, in the context of the global economic upheavals, about the
fact that the liberal market economy has ceased to be a reliable tool for the survival of states, their preservation, and for
their people.
Pope Francis said recently that capitalism has run its course. Russia has been living under capitalism for 30 years. Is it time
to search for an alternative? Is there an alternative? Could it be the revival of the left-wing idea or something radically new?
Putin: Lenin spoke about the birthmarks of capitalism, and so on. It cannot be said that we have lived these past 30
years in a full-fledged market economy. In fact, we are only gradually building it, and its institutions. [..]
You know, capitalism, the way you have described it, existed in a more or less pure form at the beginning of the previous century.
But everything changed after what happened in the global economy and in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, after World
War I. We have already discussed this on a number of occasions. I do not remember if I have mentioned this at Valdai Club meetings,
but experts who know this subject better than I do and with whom I regularly communicate, they are saying obvious and well-known
things.
When everything is fine, and the macro economic indicators are stable, various funds are building up their assets, consumption
is on the rise and so on. In such times, you hear more and more that the state only stands in the way, and that a pure market
economy would be more effective. But as soon as crises and challenges arise, everyone turns to the state, calling for the reinforcement
of its supervisory functions. This goes on and on, like a sinusoidal curve. This is what happened during the preceding crises,
including the recent ones, like in 2008.
I remember very well how the key shareholders of Russia's largest corporations that are also major European and global players
came to me proposing that the state buy their assets for one dollar or one ruble. They were afraid of assuming responsibility
for their employees, pressured by margin calls, and the like. This time, our businesses have acted differently. No one is seeking
to evade responsibility. On the contrary, they are even using their own funds, and are quite generous in doing so. The responses
may differ, but overall, businesses have been really committed to social responsibility, for which I am grateful to these people,
and I want them to know this.
Therefore, at present, we cannot really find a fully planned economy, can we? Take China. Is it a purely planned economy? No.
And there is not a single purely market economy either. Nevertheless, the government's regulatory functions are certainly important.
[..]
We just need to determine for ourselves the reasonable level of the state's involvement in the economy; how quickly that involvement
needs to be reduced, if at all, and where exactly. I often hear that Russia's economy is overregulated. But during crises like
this current pandemic, when we are forced to restrict business activity, and cargo traffic shrinks, and not only cargo traffic,
but passenger traffic as well, we have to ask ourselves – what do we do with aviation now that passengers avoid flying or fly
rarely, what do we do? Well, the state is a necessary fixture, there is no way they could do without state support.
So, again, no model is pure or rigid, neither the market economy nor the command economy today, but we simply have to determine
the level of the state's involvement in the economy. What do we use as a baseline for this decision? Expediency. We need
to avoid using any templates, and so far, we have successfully avoided that.
Then comes a paragraph that shows where Russia differs from the current 'western' economic policies of negative interest rates
and deflation:
Of course, the Central Bank and the Government are among the most important state institutions. Therefore, it was in fact through
the joint efforts of the Central Bank and the Government that inflation was reduced to 4 percent, because the Government invests
substantial resources through its social programmes and national projects and has an impact on our monetary policy. It went down
to 3.9 percent, and the Governor of the Central Bank has told me that we will most likely keep it around the estimated target
of around 4 percent. This is the regulating function of the state; there is no way around it. However, stifling development through
an excessive presence of the state in the economy or through excessive regulation would be fatal as well. You know, this is a
form of art, which the Government has been applying skilfully, at least for now.
Keeping inflation up by a bit will make it easier for Russian consumers and companies to pay back their loans. It is economically
healthier than the deflationary policies of western societies.
Russia is well on its way to overtake Germany as the fifth biggest economy. Putin's pragmatic positions towards the role of the
state in the economy and his relative generous policies of social programs and large national projects have contributed to that.
The many questions and answers on foreign policy in the Valdai talk show a similar pragmatism on other issues. For those interested
in those here is again the link to the transcript
.
Posted by b on October 24, 2020 at 18:00 UTC |
Permalink
Putin was (is) an important figure in rescuing Russia from the collapse, and western carpetbagging, of the nineties but in no
way has he moved Russia towards communism or prepared the path (structurally) for a future communist state. Despite everything
that Putin has achieved, in no way has he created a system that is separate from that of the west. The external impostion of sanctions
(by the west) has had much more effect than anything Putin has done (in terms of separting from western dogma).
This talk of "overconsumption" is totally irrelevant to Russia (Russians are still largely poor and "under"-consume) as well
as much of the rest of the world. And Russia is a huge producer of the resources (oil, gas, coal), and a huge consumer of these
same resources, that we are told are destroying the world. So Putin is not really addressing Russians or the majority of the world,
and western governments are used to hearing this kind of guff (because they say the same, frequently).
So, Putin is not referring to a Communist (economic) state; he is referring to a mixed economy just like every other western
state (yes you could also say "just like every other state in the world" but what I am demonstrating is that, at best, Putin desires
to adhere to conventional western economic dogma).
Putin is 68 and the average life expectancy on Russia is 72 (only 65 for males). Putin will be gone soon enough and what he
has built is a proud independent nation that is integrated into the world economy and is well able to defend itself. But he has
not changed the fundamental economic relations that were established in Russia after the collapse of the USSR.
So, this "remarkable...anti-capitalistic statement" is either meaningless or a signal of compliance to western/world capitalist
elites who, perhaps, wish to bring the free-market to an end and entrench their position as a permanent elite - and that would
not be communism, rather it would be feudalism.
With the advent of the industrial revolution, capitalism, mass education, democracy and then the proto-communist states it
was thought impossible (and undesireable) that social structures could regress. But, has the (within technical capacities) ability
to capture data on everyone all of the time (and analyze and interpret that data in real time) and deep understandings of behavoiuralism,
human psychology and sophisticated, convincing and all pervasive propaganda resulted in a fundamental change? In short, that it
is no longer held that all humans are free, can make their own choices, and are capable of organising society for and by themselves
(even as some kind of future objective) - and that this has been replaced by a belief that humanity is best run by a "benevolent"
elite.
I'm not sure that the concept of neo-liberalism is really applicable to Russia. What happened under Yeltsin was a simple pillage
of the state, as anyone would do if they can, as he was too drunk to notice. The same thing is happening today in UK.
Putin has spent his time trying to recover from that situation to more control, as a conservative nationalist, but its not
so easy.
"... I am confident that what makes a state strong, primarily, is the confidence it's citizens have in it. That is the
strength of a state. People are the source of power, we all know that."
Yes! 'People are the source of power' is the definition of democracy.
In the U.S., since 1980, money has increasingly become the source of political power. This is dictatorship. The U.S. has
transformed itself from an imperfect democracy, into an almost perfect 'oligarchic dictatorship' where the corporations oversee
the government, rather than the government overseeing the market. This is the very definition of fascism. And under such a system,
the U.S.'s market economy has been transformed into an economy of serial monopolies.
Russia is rapidly developing; the U.S. is rapidly failing. No need to wonder why!
Depending upon who you ask
, somewhere between 33% and 70% of Russia's economy is still state controlled. You can never say "we" when talking about
directing a capitalist market economy because "The Market" will always be boss. Though Russia suffered a catastrophic capitalist
counterrevolution, it is this large share of the economy that is not entirely subservient to market forces that gives Putin the
luxury of talking in terms of "we" , despite his submissive attitude towards capitalism.
The fact is that capitalism ( "The Market" ) cannot develop Russia. This has been the case for more than a hundred years,
which is why they had a revolution in the first place and why the privatizations have been halted and are now (grudgingly) being
reversed.
Putin's strength lies not in his ideology because his strength of conviction to that ideology is that of an overcooked noodle.
This happens to work out OK though because his ideology is neoliberal capitalism. Clinging to that ideology isn't serving any
leader in the world right now, as we can see in Europe and the US. Rather, Putin's strength is in his patriotic pragmatism. He
doesn't want to build "Socialism with Russian Characteristics" , but pragmatics forces him in that direction.
Russia will be moving to a progressive income tax regime from 2021 onwards. The current personal income tax regime is a flat
13%. From next year, individuals earning 5 million rubles or more annually will be subject to a 15% tax rate. Sounds like little
but these sorts of reforms have to take time and have to be done in small increments.
It's my understanding that the bulk of Russia's tax receipts currently come from the energy sector. I'm sure way back in 1998
Putin wrote a PhD dissertation on the use of natural resources as the basis of economic development and growth, and taxation of
energy companies would be one method of using land resources to achieve this growth.
Keeping inflation up by a bit will make it easier for Russian consumers and companies to pay back their loans. It is economically
healthier than the deflationary policies of western societies.
That's a great idea, except both government and household debt in Russia are among the lowest in the world (probably the lowest
of any industrialized country). Both Putin and the foreigners who fawn over him, including myself not very long ago, are the first
to tout this fact. This way inflation in the Russian economy means consumers get to enjoy rising costs of living, and the state
and companies rising costs of raw materials, energy etc. while there's virtually no debt on the other side of the equation for
inflation to devalue. There's still a lot of corporate sector debt in Russia, but the bulk of it is still, incredibly, denominated
in dollars, euros, Swiss franc, and so on. Ruble inflation and falling exchange rates don't make this debt to cheaper to service,
but of course the opposite.
It's a great thing that the rate of home ownership (without associated mortgage debt) is so high in Russia, and it's probably
the only result of the privatization drive that was actually a good outcome. There's no reason that Russians should now be loaded
up with huge debts in order to own a house or an apartment. Access to personal credit for things like a car is difficult and expensive
in Russia, which obviously means a lot of people can't afford a car, but on the other further helps to ensure the indebtedness
of households is kept low. At the same time, like Putin (and b) does here, many in Russia apparently want to pretend that their
economy is like a Western economy, and that accordingly its households are partially relieved financially by inflation when they
actually only suffer from increased prices. It's absolutely bizarre.
The reality is that Russia's leadership has an unparalleled commitment toward, and talent for, getting the worst of all worlds
economically. Thanks to them Russia is probably the only major economy in the world with high inflation but microscopic domestic
currency debt (and correspondingly low investment in the domestic economy). This way Russia has gotten to enjoy, historically,
very high inflation but much lower growth rates than other developing economies. (The high growth rates in the 2000's came from
high raw materials prices, resulting merely in accumulation of foreign exchange reserves which the Russian government itself then
said could not be efficiently converted into rubles and invested in the Russian economy. Growth in industrial and agricultural
production, or in fixed assets like infrastructure, was accordingly much smaller, if even existent.)
There's also the continuing Wild West capitalism where oligarchs have gotten to keep their stolen assets in potash, gold mining,
coal mining etc., even in strategic industrial sectors like steelmaking, power engineering or the automotive industry, while at
the same time even Chinese investors are discouraged from investing through opaque regulation and unpredictable Russian state
intervention. In other words, stability for the oligarchs who openly tried to destroy the Russian state and turn it into a Hong
Kong-style neo-feudal hellhole, and who today just as before continue to asset strip the last residues of Soviet-era manufacturing,
but a Great Wall against the Asians who want to come in and develop petrochemicals plants, e-commerce, timber industry or whatever.
Through the entire 2000-2012 era, the Russian government came down like a hawk on ruble-denominated debt, while corporations
(both private and state-owned) could take out basically unlimited loans in foreign currency. State-owned companies like Rosneft
actually led the foreign currency indebtedness, helping enormously to ensure that Russia's only real advantage and asset in the
post-Soviet era, the trade surplus resulting from its oil and gas exports, is sent out of the country as interest payments to
American and European banks, rather than (as China has done) paying for the imports of Western machinery and technologies to help
develop domestic manufacturing.
Certainly, Russian companies are now much more restricted in the amounts of foreign currency credit they can accept, but access
to ruble credit is highly limited as well. The result is of course austerity in the economy, with anemic growth and falling living
standards.
Another important "benefit" was that the West had an easy way to put pressure on the ruble. They simply forbade Russian companies
from rolling over their debt, forcing them to come up with huge sums of foreign currency in short order. That crashed the rouble,
thereby dramatically forcing up prices (and equivalently, inflation) in the, by its own design, almost completely import-dependent
Russian economy. The crash in oil prices (again, simply limiting Russia's income in dollar terms, much of which they needed simply
to pay back Western creditors anyway) was just icing on the cake.
One could keep going like this forever. If China and South Korea had political and corporate elites with this mentality, and
with this level of commitment to neo-liberalism and globalization, but (critically!) only to its worst aspects and outcomes, these
countries would have been very lucky to be at the level of development of Thailand today. That's the reality and attacking people
who raise these criticisms as enemies of Russia, as many did to me in the last thread about thread on these topics, does nothing
to help matters. In fact, with "friends" like you, maybe Russia does not need enemies.
I've been having fun listening and reading the reactions and selected excerpts in the media to the long, very long Putin conference,
three hours with the question and answer segment, the most substantial and interesting, but five hours total considering that
he appeared two hours late, no doubt preparing until the last minute and over the speech as could be seen in the notes that he
held and that somehow the sound technicians did not filter out completely, which was a bit annoying.
Checking out the chaotic notes that I took, there is one little detail that most surely won't get any attention, his recourse
to widely used popular expressions like when he asks himself rhetorically:
what is a strong state? What are its strengths?
The Russian word for strength could be translated as power too, and any an every Russian recalls the great hero of the dark
90's, the late Serguey Bodrov in the film "The Brother 2", partly filmed in Chicago, Bodrov asks a panicked businessman: Tell
me American, where is the power? is the power in money? I think the power is in truth . a phrase that everybody knows and
feels proud of in Russia.
Vlad not only plays complex accords for foreign consumption, he plays for the home team first, just in case .
Putin, like all politicians, is more about what he says and less about what he does.
Fair enough, i challenge anyone in his position to do better... I actually admire the man, but let's not delude ourselves.
Russia stands to benefit from global warming more than any other country in spite of all the damage it will still cause it. On
the overall balance, it will average out ahead of everyone else, in relative terms, so don't look to them for answers.
As for "the State"... so what if it's his mates who benefit instead of oligarchs, what is the difference when most of the people
in Russia are broke and have no realistic prospects or chances of progressing beyond their predetermined fates? The cynic in me
ultimately thinks he just wants the oligarchs to pay their taxes to make his job easier, keep the people happy, so he can get
reelected more easily.
@ Eric | Oct 24 2020 21:10 utc | 18.. eric, i was intrigued by your ideas in the previous thread and i am again here... how do
you come by this particular vantage point?? do you have a particular background in finances, or is it just a special interest
that you have cultivated to come by the position you share in your post here? i am genuinely curious! i don't have enough knowledge
to comment and wish someone like Michael Hudson could comment on this specific topic that you seem to excel at holding a very
specific and fairly negative outlook on with regard Russia... thanks for your comments either way.. it is above my pay grade to
respond with any authority..
i continue to believe the planet is being screwed by big finance.. it seems hard to see thru the maze a way out of
this... your suggestion that russia is also caught in this maze would not surprise me... what is the way out, if i might be so
bold??
I think your post points to a fundamental worrisome feature of Russia. It's very unclear who actually has a stake in the prosperity,
power or even existence of the Russian state in 50 or 100 years' time. People can pretend that the Russian Orthodox Church plays
this role but there's very little to suggest it really does. India, I think, unfortunately struggles with the same problem, but
the destruction of India at the hands of British goes a long way to explain it in my view. In China or Iran, with all the issues
of their own that those two countries have, there's however very little ambiguity in this regard.
I'm not even sure I would place the blame on Western-style representative democracy in Russia, as the same basic problem seems
to have been there both before the October Revolution and at the very least during the post-Stalin era of the Soviet Union. The
question is if Russia, despite everything, as a Christian civilization isn't ultimately a participant in the Western world's anomie
and decline.
Yes! Absolutely capitalism is rapidly destroying the planet. Of this there is no question. Nothing can be left alone: 'undeveloped'
land must be 'developed', i.e. forests cut down and replaced by subdivisions, parking lots, McDonald's, office buildings, etc.
Capitalism is truly insidious: look at how the once mighty Amazon rainforest has been utterly wiped out by greedy cattle farmers
looking for a quick buck with the blessing of Bolsonaro. Where there were once massive old growth forests across N. America, there
are now only 'tree museums', i.e. national parks which save less than 1% of what there once was before Europeans came and destroyed
everything–in the name of profit. Capitalism not only destroys natural resources, it destroys people: slavery has been replaced
by wage slavery: and the wage slave's earnings from his 'mcjob' invariably go to his landlord, or other parasites. Your employer
is your master in capitalism: he is your god and you serve him. Any excess profit you make all goes to him, not you. If you look
at him wrong, or have a bad attitude you are replaced–and NO good reference for you! What a miserable shit system craptialism
is.
I have been strongly influenced by Michael Hudson's writings over several years now. Basically everything in that post is either
a point he already made about Russia or a direct application of his overall thinking on Russia's economy. For this reason I was
very surprised by the hostility of certain commenters, in particular karlof1, who also could be called followers of Michael Hudson.
karlof1 even suggested I should spend a couple of years researching Russian economic development, even though I've quite obviously
already done that (which doesn't mean everyone has to agree with my conclusions). I have to wonder if he and Martyanov either
never came across Hudson's criticisms of Russian economic policy (one of the actually less harsh examples
here - if you search
his site michael-hudson.com you can find others) or consider him also an ignorant anti-Russian commentator but are able to appreciate
him in spite of that.
I wrote about this part of Putin's speech back on the 22nd when he made this appraisal:
" only a viable state can act effectively in a crisis ."
I bolded the text then and I've done so again because that's one of the most important points he raised, IMO, particularly
in relation to the clearly unviable Outlaw US Empire and EU. I even turned my commentary into a short article at my VK space that
will be expanded once I digest all the Q & A.
I recently made an observation about Russia's banking and finance systems in that they're controlled by the public via the
state, not by some private entities separate from the state doing all they can to avoid any type of regulation and oversight,
which was based on this item I linked here at the
time. I later made the observation that the moral/ethical grounding of who/what's in charge of those systems matters greatly when
it comes to making an equitable society--and it will matter even more as we get into the having steady-state economies as resource
depletion mounts into the crisis it will eventually become. Putin showed that he knows and understands all that, which is well
beyond the capacity of the vast majority of those known as politicians--especially those in Neoliberal nations. Putin used the
term "balance" 7 times, imbalance once, in his speech. I suggest readers use the CTRL-F function to search the text for that term
to see what it's in reference to so they can learn a bit more about the man and his mind and the importance of seeking balance
in attaining equitability.
At the tail end of the Q & A, Putin is asked: "what you can advise and offer to Russian youth?" Putin's answer conforms completely
with his policy toward the promotion of families and urging young people to strive for their aspirations -- unlike many Western
politicos, he backs his admonitions with robust policies to make them possible, something I've long admired about him. Here's
most of Putin's reply:
"But what can we offer? We believe we will give young people more opportunities for professional growth and create more
social lifts for them. We are building up these instruments and creating conditions for people to receive a good education,
make a career, start a family and receive enough income for a young family.
"We are drafting an increasing number of measures to support young families. Let me emphasise that even during the pandemic,
most of our support measures were designed for families with children. What are these families? They are young people for the
most part.
"We will continue doing this in the hope that young people will use their best traits – their daring striving to move
ahead without looking back at formalities that probably make older generations more reserved – for positive, creative endeavours.
Eventually, the younger generation will take the baton from the older generation and continue this relay race, and make Russia
stronger."
The difference in that regard between Putin's vision and his actions when compared to the Outlaw US Empire and other Neoliberal
nations is beyond stark--it's as if they inhabit two different solar systems.
The reason Putin's hated by the West is he took an unviable Russia and made it more than viable again. IMO, he's the unequaled
Dean of what few Statesmen exist in today's world, which makes him an asset for humanity.
There used to be a regular commenter at Mark Chapman's Kremlin Stooge / The New Kremlin Stooge - I forget his KS name but he
was a physicist (and not a very good-tempered one at that, he had regular shouting matches with one other commenter Yalensis there)
-- but he was of the opinion that interest rates set by the Central Bank of Russia have been too high and have discouraged small
business investment in Russia. The head of the CBR may still be Elvira Nabiullina -- I haven't checked lately. She and others
in the government who help set monetary policies in Russia are suspected of being neoliberal and Atlanticist in their outlook.
As President, Putin is not responsible for setting domestic policies - that's Prime Minister Mishustin's job.
Putin spoke all that in a very specific environment (in a room full of rabid liberals/pro-capitalists), so we should be care about
its content.
There are some incongruousness in his speech we must correct here:
1) It is a myth the State, during the golden age of liberalism (16th-19th Centuries) was "minimal". On the contrary: there
was a ton of State intervention in the people's daily life - including the right of the State to separate whole families and use
their children in servile labor. The difference here is that the gross of that intervention was directed to the dispossessed,
i.e. the working classes. There was also a ton of regulations over slave ownership. The age of classical liberalism is considered
one of minimum State because the freedom of the powerful slave owners and industrialists was almost zero; it's the History told
from the point of view of the capitalists. That's why Putin clearly said "[capitalism] the way you have described it [...]"
2) The mixed system between what he calls "State intervention" (welfare of the people, command or planned economy) and "free
market" is the scientific definition of socialism. Marx wasn't an idealist: he was a materialist. He knew a direct transition
to communism was impossible, therefore he imagined a system of transition, where communism and capitalism would exist together.
This transition system was called socialism. That's why China, still governed by a Marxist-Leninist Party, considers itself socialist
and not capitalist, or even "mixed" for that matter;
Another observation: the Western countries didn't enter deflation/low inflation because of ZIRP/NIRP. They were already suffering
from it before those policies. The opposite is the true: precisely because they were having a too low inflation, they resorted
to ZIRP/NIRP.
Yep re my comment @ 29: Nabiullina is still CBR head according to her Wikipedia entry. Since becoming CBR head back in 2012 or
2013, she has consistently followed a policy of tackling inflation first to the extent of keeping interest rates higher than they
perhaps should be. This probably helps explain some of the issues Eric @ 18 raises about Russians' access to personal credit.
Interestingly Nabiullina's Wikipedia entry shows she worked with Alexei Kudrin in the past. Kudrin has a reputation for preferring
neoliberal economic policies. Currently he is Inspector General in the Russian govt's audit office where he can mouth off all
he likes about how he'd reform Russian economic policies if he got the chance but not actually do much damage: a case of Putin
keeping potential enemies somewhere where they can be watched.
Eric does raise the issue about how Russian oligarchs were allowed to keep their gains and not be forced to pay back taxes
they owed way back in the early 2000s, but this was on condition that they not meddle in Russian federal politics and buy influence,
and pay all their future taxes and other obligations, like paying their employees, promptly and in accordance with Russian laws.
Those who refused ended up in prison (Khodorkovsky) or fled overseas (Berezovsky). Roman Abramovich paid an unusual penalty: he
was made Governor of Chukotka in far eastern Siberia near the Bering Sea for a couple of years at least. He paid for all that
territory's infrastructure improvements. Of course the people there must love him!
So why are not all barflies writing and thinking about the role of the state in the economy within the context of current private
control of finance in the West?
What is blinding you all to not state the obvious role issue of those that own global private finance not being any "state"
of transparency?
We are in a civilization war about the fact that a current state in our world, China, has a public finance core of government
which is opposed to the Western cult of global private finance. Wake up.
Reading the entrails of the Russian economy that has been ravaged for decades by the cult of private finance and its followers
in Russia does us no service to b's question of what role the state should have in the national and world economy. Because Russia
is still having to operate with the shit show called empire they are limited in their response. I was taught 50 years ago that
a 2% inflation rate was optimal but because Russia is trying to build its population, it is spending more money supporting that
segment of the overall population and saying the inflation rate is worth the investment.
The role of the state in the economy
History has shown positive results from what are called mixed economies. The US is a mixed economy with the state, at various
levels, supporting energy, transportation, USPS, water, sewage treatment, police and fire protection, education, SSI, regulations,
etc. There are and have been attempts to privatize all those things under the canard that the service can be provided "better"
with profit as the motive other than service to others.
There is no magic mixed economy formula for any one state and it will change over time like Russia is choosing to do. But the
state has limited control of the economy if the tools of finance are privately held and not integrated into state functionality....and
it is my understanding that the Central Bank in Russia for example is not entirely a sovereign entity...what sayest our most recent
barfly, Eric?
Please join in a more reasoned contextual discussion of our world. I am tired of reading about "ism"s. More reality please.
Thank you b for continuing this conversation. The speech and Q&A were most interesting. They were consistent with what Putin has
said before, but done so this time with more confidence as even the oppression of the covid situation was dealt with in honorable
fashion - if one can honor a virus, that is. It is always, with Putin, that the people come first, and he made that statement
at the beginning.
Countries, all countries, have that obligation in their governance that it be for the people's welfare. So, to him, whatever
system a country has is only important in that respect and each country, drawing on its own history and its assets, decides for
itself what that style of governance will be.
This is different from any outside system being touted as the ideal. There isn't an ideal. It all depends on how the people
wish to be governed, based on what they feel is important to them. That is democracy in its loosest terms. He said several times
that any philosophy of government imposed by outsiders will never work.
At the same time, his support for the UN system on a world wide basis is as unconditional as his first premise.
I meant to add that casting my mind back to the last debate, the one thing being said about the people was Biden intensely eyeing
us and telling us about the empty chair at the kitchen table - nice!
.. an important task of abandoning the practice of unrestrained and unlimited consumption – overconsumption – in favour of
judicious and reasonable sufficiency, when you do not live just for today but also think about tomorrow.
We need to land somewhere between North Korea and the US on consumption. John Judge used to talk about how 30 houses on a street
need 30 lawnmowers. Why not buy one lawnmower, share it and maintain it? I ditched my lawns long ago as that is also over consumption
but I use it as an example of what type of society we have built.
"... I am confident that what makes a state strong, primarily, is the confidence it's citizens have in it. That is the strength
of a state. People are the source of power, we all know that."
It is not just confidence it is having an educated competent citizenry. Our top education institutions, especially the ivy
league, are cranking out students trained to protect the status quo hence things will not changed easily.
Moon is going to end up on the Russian disinformation agitators list.
@ Posted by: psychohistorian | Oct 25 2020 0:05 utc | 32
This "mixed economies won the Cold War" is an old story already. Eric Hobsbawn left a letter claiming just before he died,
in 2012.
The problem with the Scandinavian economies is this: who's gonna do the dirty jobs? You cannot simply make a nation of designers
and white collar workers. The social-democracies of the post-war solved this problem with the Third World countries, but now those
countries are not accepting this role anymore.
Besides, there's the objective fact even the Scandinavian economies are declining, with inequality skyrocketing since the end
of the 1990s. They, too, are susceptible to the laws of capitalism.
"Strengthening our country and looking at what is happening in the world, in other countries, I want to say to those who are still
waiting for the gradual demise of Russia: in this case, we are only worried about one thing -- how not to catch a cold at your
funeral", Putin said on Thursday at a meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club.
That's an interesting question. How are the underclass workers (construction, janitors, street sweepers) wage and social benefits
in the Nordic countries in comparison with China, S. Korea and Japan?
Those are important points. It seems to be a common pattern in neoliberal economics. The answer to "why" that I pieced together
is this: It is all about the oligarchs in combination with their immediate overseas business partners. Typically they own a considerable
portion of the foreign-jurisdiction bonds lent to their own nations. It is a straightforward money laundering arrangement.
The Russian government cannot simply remove the domestic oligarchs**, no more than a US or EU government could do the same
against equivalent local business powers. Rather, they come to a livable equilibrium. Preventing investment from China, EU etc,
is, in addition to defending national sovereignty, also a case of the government defending the domestic oligarchs from foreign
rivals -- rivals who would have greater financial resources with the backing of their own larger home regions.
However, the big difference in the case of Russia, compared to most countries victimized by the neoliberal pattern, is that
the government is powerful enough to quite reliably protect the local oligarchs from their foreign rivals, including pretty much
anything that the foreign rival's home governments can possibly throw at them (i.e. the various regime change toolbox). This protection
is a massively valuable service. For this reason, the Russian government can, if it is halfway decent and perhaps above-average
in managing the difficult internal politics, negotiate a better (i.e. more long-term sustainable) arrangement with the local oligarchs,
in terms of how the citizens are affected.
[** but with all the sanctions etc, this balance of power actually shifts]
You do realize that the Russians have three (3) vaccines, and the Chinese one (1) in late stage 3 trials, with Sputnik V due to
complete theirs next month and to go into serial production shortly. Putin's strategy is to vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate.
Mishustin is busy holding trade fairs promoting the Russian arctic. Business residency for $$RUB$$$. Ski resorts on the Kola peninsula...
While his enemies implode under the second COVID-19 wave....
Thank you Alicia for putting up that interview. I like very much the articles Orlov writes, and many of them I find translated
in French. He has humour, unlike more well known geopolitics analysts. Try this one:
That Valdai speech / Q&A was a master class in governance.
While Putin thinks and talks like a sane man, Western leaders reveal daily that they are now not sanity-capable, not logic-capable,
not sanity-capable, not shame-capable.
Putin shows a commanding grasp of his nation's people, economy, culture, history, environment, geo-strategic needs, impressively
rattling off numbers, statistics, reason, rationale, logic and pragmatic good sense. In all that, he reminds me of that other
great world-class leader, Lee Kuan Yew, whom Kissinger once called the Wise Man of Asia. Russia is fortunate to be governed by a world-class leader and his team today, but good luck to the Great Toilet Bowl Stirrers
in the West.
Putin: "But I would address it more broadly to discuss also an important task of abandoning the practice of unrestrained and unlimited
consumption – overconsumption – in favour of judicious and reasonable sufficiency, when you do not live just for today but also
think about tomorrow..... After all, it is within our power to stop being egoistical, greedy, mindless and wasteful consumers....
We just need to open our eyes, look around us and see that the land, air and water are our common inheritance from above, and
we must learn to cherish them, just as we must cherish every human life, which is precious. This is the only way forward in this
complicated and beautiful world. I do not want to see the mistakes of the past repeated."
Was Putin talking about Russians? or about Americans? Who are those exceptional 4% of the global population who demands to consume 40% of global resources?
Putin: "So, we want the voice of our citizens to be decisive and to see constructive proposals and requests from different social
forces get implemented.... what you call your political system is immaterial...."
It doesn't matter if it is a 'democratic' or 'socialist', but governments that primarily serve the people's needs (not the
elite's greed) will listen to, and DO, the people's will. Out of that, the people give their CONSENT to be governed.
Today, ALL governments use a mix of democratic and socialist tools, eg. China, Russia, UK, USA. But, unlike the West, who boast
that their system is more perfect, China and Russia serve their people primarily.
As Deng said, it does not matter if the cat is black or white.
How much of America's policy's are run out of pure jealousy of Russia and China ?
Rather than being a supper power, they have regressed into immature petulant juvenile tantrums.
Self-distruction and self-harm.
Putin is a "statesman". A few squalid pretenders in the political class here may aspire to that title, but It is not a badge you
pin on yourself, it is awarded by general acclaim. Putin has stepped into the vacuum of world leadership left by the US Idiocracy
when Trump took over with the help of his free market, anti-government cohort, the Koch's, Robert Mercer, Paul Singer, and etc.
Putin is the champion of arms control, multilateralism & cooperation, and following this address certainly, environmentalism.
All attempts to demonize Putin on the part of the neoliberal US oligarchy collapse when the diminutive Russian Mongol begins to
speak. I join in the applause. It is so refreshing to listen to a leader talking sense for a change! I don't care if he is a benevolent
authoritarian anti-democrat, I am so grateful for his intelligent leadership that I salute! And I thank b for bringing this Valdai
event to our attention. The poverty and ideological blindness of our media conglomerates is just outrageous!
"Overconsumption" , in and of itself, isn't the problem. The problem is the distortion of value that capitalist empire
introduces. If the effort required to acquire some thing accurately reflected the effort to produce that thing then consumption
would be naturally self-limiting. After all, who could every day consume products containing two days worth of effort if they
had to work two days for every day worth of their consuming? "Overconsumption" can only occur because the empire expropriates
massive amounts of produced value from its vassals and uses that robbed value to buy off its domestic population. Likewise, capitalism
over-rewards certain portions of the domestic population (typically no-skill "professionals" such as journalists and middle
managers) who act as "insulation" for the elites from the working class.
Note that you don't see "overconsumption" among factory workers in Bangladesh or Malaysia. Child slave laborers working
on African cocoa plantations for your Hershey bars could never be accused of "overconsumption" . It would even be unjust
to accuse Chinese workers, as much as their standards of living have exploded over the last couple decades, of indulging in
"overconsumption" .
When China is successful in replacing the US$ with a scientifically managed "currency basket" for international trade
and currency reserve then the problem of "overconsumption" will correct itself and the Global North will go on a diet.
I am not sure that will be possible though without some "kinetic" events between now and then.
On the role of the state on the economy...and on everything else...things not discussed at Valdai, nor at MoA for that matter,
and which contribute to promote the disintegration of states so wished by the neorreactionaires due the lose of confidence of
citizens in the state-
Making the broth to fascism, on the verge of coming "curfews" to be stablished in Spain ,and other European countries...One
wonders why the hell Thiel & associated, those owners of hedge funds and managers of our personal data on behalf of already fascist
givernment like that in the US, need to follow trying to implant their so wished feudal state where the masses are submitted into
slavery, when all that is this already here...and without complaints from our part...
(...)A recent article by Carlota García Encina, an analyst at the Elcano Royal Institute, described the coronavirus pandemic
as "an opportunity for NATO." Specifically, it stated that "the universality of the coronavirus means that NATO must defend
the 30 as if they were one, going from" one for all and all for one "to" all for all ".
In 2003, and anticipating events like the cheating poker player who anticipates his results, NATO released - it was not
secret - the Urban Operations in the Year 2020 report, a socio-economic analysis of the situation in Europe where it anticipated
a crisis unprecedented in the history of capitalism, where urban poverty "could grow significantly in the future, leading to
possible uprisings, civil unrest and threats to security that will require the intervention of local authorities".
The analysis was only a preview of the crisis that the capitalist system was forging. The United Nations evaluated in 2019,
and counting on the data as of December 31, 2018 (that is, less than a year and a half after the "coronavirus crisis"), that
26.1% of the population in Spain, and 29.5% of those under 18 years of age were in a situation of poverty. That more than 55%
had difficulties to make ends meet, and that 5.4% had severe deficiencies (access to electricity, drinking water, heating,
etc.). Official unemployment was 13.78%, more than double the EU average, and youth unemployment was 30.51% among those under
25 years of age. We insist, before the State of Alarm decreed on March 14, 2020.(...)
(...)Any investigation of an event ("coronavirus crisis") has to start from the circumstances that surround it to obtain accurate
conclusions, and not the other way around. The origin of this crisis that is impoverishing millions of people cannot be limited
to March 14, 2020, because as we have seen, the problem came from long before.
If we add to this that many of the decisions that are transforming society towards a privatist model (locked up at home)
and individualistic (normalizing the suppression of rights) were made based on the criteria of a "committee of experts" that
has not existed, we can never set off an alarm that this is not just a "fucking virus."
But the second question that we need to verify is the deterrent effect of the exercise of those rights which imply these
decisions, because even the left is accepting the official account of the events with astonishing passivity.(...)
(...)Paul Von Hindenburg, who came to power thanks to his family fortune, and with credentials manufactured by that fortune,
ended the German Weimar Constitution of 1919 by signing the Reichstag Fire Decree and ushering in something that at the time
of being approved no one called fascism. In the current context, the succession of regulations of this "new exceptionality"
grants an extraordinary delegation of functions to the police or civil guard officers.
With this empowered power, there is no place to turn back. The curfew that will be established in the next few hours may
one day be eliminated from the BOE, but the meaning of this measure is that mass psychology incorporates a disciplined attitude
towards the reality that surrounds us into its behavior.
And what surrounds us is what we already know. Faced with the question of whether or not we should comply with the restrictions
imposed by the State (confinement, isolation, no meetings, no leisure), we must ask ourselves (as we should have done before
March 14) if we are willing to accept or not that poverty and repression are part of our lives .
The stock market crash of 1987, the savings and loan debacle, the tech bubble, the Asian tigers meltdown, the world "recession"
of 2008 and today's global slump (which preceded the pandemic, a point neglected by the apologists for capitalism,) show that
capitalism doesn't work as advertised, even on its own limited terrain. All claims about how "I" (whether it's Putin, Trump, Boris
Johnson, Macron, a miscellaneous German, whoever) am smart enough to solve the minor details of finance responsible have been
proven by history to be lies. Whether born of sincerely felt megalomania or calculated perfidy doesn't matter, instability and
inequality (which is a bad thing, not a good one, no matter what secret feelings may be harbored,) *are* the normal operations
of market economies.
When you add to that the way the global capitalist system is creating a global environmental crisis, the shamelessness of the
capitalist apologists is staggering. Putin is a fool.
The fraud Proyect seems to think Xi is actively commanding the Chinese economy in such a fashion as to be personally responsible
for, well, everything, conveniently omits that Xi is to be condemned precisely for *not* taking charge the way needed, for advancing
the power of the Chinese bourgeoisie even at the expense of the future of China. But then, Proyect is anticommunist/pro imperialist,
a champion of barbarism using pious phrases.
Lastly, the notion that "overconsumption" is the problem, is basically an attack on the masses of the people. The problem is
the accumulation of capital, of money, which is not consumed, but "invested" for yet more money. There's a fake left website called
Crooked Timer where the oh-so-refined-sensibilities of a clot of academics is offended by the rabble eating meat...but they're
not offended by billionaires having more money than they can spend! This is the same thing. The pursuit of money, profit, is not
overconsumption, but that, not overconsumption, distorts the economy. Starting with vague notions like overconsumption reflects
a deep ideological disorientation...or a commitment to capitalism, imperialism and ultimately barbarism.
Things not discussed at Valdai...on the "eco-scam", how the Spanish IBEX35 giants, private great corporations on energy, transports
and clothing, claim thousands of millions from European Funds ( which come from tax payers money, not from the private bank accounts
of European officials, do not forget...) on the alibi of "energetic transition" and "sustainability"....This is the new scam after
that of rescuing big banks in 2008, for the bailing out and profit of those of always while the population impoverishes at galloping
pace and without any prospect of recovery, austerity seems to be our only prospect...
On the "pipelines war", also discussed at Valdai, of which it is part the alleged "Navalny poisoning" also briefly discussed without
naming that unimportant, at Russian and world level, person, how to explain that Germany must cut off Nord Stream 2 pipeline
development on the grounds of not linking its energetic sovereignty to Russia, and then Europe must link its energetic sovereignty
to Israel, when the EU has been an historical defender of Palestinian people´s rights and with this link Europe will be submitted
to blackmail on the part of Israel anytime it dares criticize Israel´s apartheid measures against Palestinians?
After diplomatically recognizing Israel, the UAE signed a contract through the MRLB with the Israeli company EAPC (which manages
the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline) to transport crude oil to Europe without having to cross the Suez Canal
Very true jadan, your view on Putin, and every time I read an excerpt or a speech by him I notice he is far above our western
"leaders" with their meaningless chatter and hollow phrases. That's why you will never read the slightest alinea by Putin in der
Spiegel,le Monde ,or le Figaro.The vile venal journo's can't afford to print it and keep up their unmerited credibility at the
same time.Same for Lavrov,Assad,Xi and Khadafi.
American grocery stores - 80 pct of the items are not necessary and are likely harmful to some degree. Junk food outlets, it's
been known for decades that this stuff leads to obesity, diabetes, and who knows what else. The authorities could mandate changes
to low fat, sugar and salt contents that would apply to all of them with no real harm to their business, but it doesn't get done
because the right people get paid off.
Putin stands out like a shining light amongst what are called world leaders.
Some are just bosses of crime syndicates, follow my eyes (USA). Others are just hopeless idiot figure-heads, like Trudeau.
(I am biased, particularly dislike him. Macron is in the same bin.)
Putin's statements about the 'economy' are calculatedly 'judicious' and unassailable. Note, he only says one has to question
the role of the State in the 'economy' in the sense of control of it, with the State as a mega-regulator + law-maker wielding
authority from the top - not as negotiator, as far as I have understood Putin.
That 'State control' should be different in different conditions -- regions, epochs, etc., is a truism. Putin projects the
feel of 'reasonable control' and 'piloting' (encouraging xyz.. or the opposite..) which rejects both despotic, authoritarian stances,
often 'arbitrary' (or experienced as such), as well as, on the other side, anarchy and unbridled profiteering -> racketeering,
monopolies, cartels, fraud, violence, coercion, etc. Some call that capitalism, others gangsterism.
Russia, land + ressource rich, with a 'low' population density, with well-educated ppl (as compared to many others), its 'economy'
at least not plunging or even stagnant (GDP per capita or some such), is well positioned to put forward such 'reasonable' thoughts.
Humanity's dilemma or rather looming disaster sink-hole - see: ressource extraction, trashing the environment, irreversible
tipping points, 'peak oil' (gone out of fashion with fracking in the US), and other over-consumption (sand for ex.), destruction
(soils.. rivers.. ocean.. global warming..), over-population, global warming.. will not be reversed or in any way solved, by reasoned
Putin-type discourse. (see pnyzx at 4, vk 30, psychohistorian 32 and others..)
For sure, Putin's job is not to solve the world's problems but to protect and nurture Russia and its people and he does that
very well.
"while at the same time even Chinese investors are discouraged from investing through opaque regulation and unpredictable Russian
state intervention."
I wonder if they are becoming more open to western investors. Nordstream 2's financing is ~50% European, and this from Oilprice.com:
". . . .No wonder, then, that a number of banks have pledged a total of $9.5 billion in funding for Novatek's second LNG project,
the Arctic LNG 2. According to a Reuters report, the China Development Bank and German Euler Hermes are among the lenders that
have made pledges, and French Pbifrance is yet to decide on the funding. The China Development Bank is, unsurprisingly, the most
generous backer of the $21-billion Arctic LNG 2 project, with $5 billion.
Arctic LNG 2 will have a liquefaction capacity of $19.8 [sic] million tons of LNG annually divided among three liquefaction
trains."
PS - Good to see you posting after you were virtually assaulted last week.
Den lille Abe,
I nowadays start to read comments from the "bottom up" - in order not to fall into the traps of some trolls, some of those I know
by name, and this prevents me to read their comments. In other words, if you continue reading from top down, you don't know who's
comment you read...
Interesting transcript. Simple, no-frills English.
Judging from the English subtitles in Oliver Stone's 4-part series The Putin Interviews, Putin is no stranger to refreshingly
frank, clear and unambiguous communication, No wonder Russians love him.
Huge contrast with the mendacity of pseudo-Christian ratbags masquerading as Western Leaders on the world stage. Evidence of
the Scum Mo Government's laughably opaque and unaccountable corruption is seeping out of every crack in the facade of what passes
for 'democracy' in Oz.
Russia is done with the European Union. At last week's Valdai Discussion Forum Russian
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made this quite clear with this statement.
Those people in the West who are responsible for foreign policy and do not understand the
necessity of mutually respectable conversation–well, we must simply stop for a while
communicate with them. Especially since Ursula von der Leyen states that geopolitical
partnership with current Russia's leadership is impossible. If this is the way they want it,
so be it. (H/T Andrei Martyanov)
Lavrov's statements echo a number of statements made in recent months by Russian leadership
that there is no opportunity for diplomacy possible with the United States.
We can now add the European Union to that list. Pepe
Escobar's latest piece goes over Lavrov's comments about the European Union and they are
devastating, as devastating as when he and Putin described the U.S. as " Not
Agreement Capable " a few years ago.
Lavrov reiterated this with the following comments at Valdai last week.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/zV_W3b_4G50
But as badly as the U.S. has acted in recent years in international relations, unilaterally
abrogating treaty after treaty, nominally with the goal of remaking them to be more inclusive,
Lavrov's upbraiding of the current leadership of the European Union is far worse.
Because they have gone along with, if not openly assisted, every U.S.-backed provocation
against Russia for their own advantage. From Ukraine to MH-17, to Skripal to now Belarus and
the ridiculous Navalny poisoning, the EU has proved to be worse than the U.S.
Because there can be no doubt the U.S. views Russia as an antagonist. We're quite clear
about this. But Europe plays off U.S. aggression, hiding in the U.S.'s skirts while telling
Russia, usually through German Chancellor Angela Merkel, "Be patient, we are reluctantly going
along with this." But really they're happy about it.
You do not negotiate with monkeys, you treat them nicely, you make sure that they are not
abused, but you don't negotiate with them, same as you don't negotiate with toddlers. They
want to have their Navalny as their toy–let them. I call on Russia to start wrapping
economic activity up with EU for a long time. They buy Russia's hydrocarbons and hi-tech,
fine. Other than that, any other activity should be dramatically reduced and necessity of the
Iron Curtain must not be doubted anymore.
And the truth is that Russia is dealing with monkeys in the U.S. and toddlers in the EU. And
Martanyov's right that it's time Putin et.al. simply turn their backs on the West and move
forward.
Lavrov's statements at Valdai were momentous. They sent a clear signal that if Europe wants
a future relationship with Russia they will have to change how they do business.
The problem is however, that the EU is suffused with arrogance on the eve of the U.S.
election, mistakenly thinking Joe Biden will beat Trump.
Merkel has betrayed Putin at every turn since 2013. And Germany's appalling behavior over
the Alexei Navalny poisoning was the last straw.
That what was another sabotage effort to stop the Nordstream 2 pipeline and add grist to
Trump's re-election mill was given even a cursory glance by the highest levels of the German
government was insulting enough.
That Merkel allowed her Foreign Minister Heiko Maas to run his mouth on the subject, and
then throw the decision to sanction Russia (again) over this to the EU parliament and give it
any kind of political play was truly treacherous.
Germany has taken the lead in advancing "European integration" and therefore prioritizes
Eastern European member states that push for a more aggressive stance towards Russia.
Economic connectivity with Russia is no longer an instrument for building trust and
cooperation in the pan-European space, rather it was intended to strengthen Germany's
position as the center of the EU. Moscow should work with Berlin to construct Nord Stream 2,
but not forget why Nord Stream 1 was built while South Stream was blocked.
This is a point I've been making for years. Nordstream 2 is a political tool for Germany to
reroute gas coming in from Russia which Merkel can use as a political lever over Poland and the
Visegrads.
And it is the Poles who have consistently shot themselves in the foot by not reconciling
their relationship with Russia, banding together with its Eastern European brothers and
securing an independent source of Russian gas. Putin and Gazprom would happily provide it to
them, if they would but ask.
But they don't and instead turn to the U.S. to be their protectors from both Russia and
Germany, rather than conduct themselves as a sovereign nation.
That said, I think Mr. Diesen misses the larger point here. It is true Germany under Merkel
is looking to expand its control over the EU and set itself up as a superpower for the next
century. Putin himself acknowledged
that possibility at Valdai. That may be more to dig at the U.S. and warn Europe rather than
him actually believing it.
Because under Merkel and the EU Germany is losing its dynamism. And it may even lose control
over the EU if it isn't careful. If you look at the current situation from a German perspective
you realize that Germany's mighty export business is surrounded by hostile foreign powers.
Russia -- Merkel cut off the country from Russian markets. Even though some of the trade
with Russia has returned since sanctions over Crimea went into place in 2014 she hasn't
fought the U.S.'s hyper-aggressive use of sanctions to improve Germany's position.
The U.K. -- French President Emmanuel Macron looks like he's engineered a No-Deal Brexit
with Boris Johnson which will put up major export barriers for Germany into the U.K. cutting
them off from that market.
The U.S. – Trump has all but declared Germany an enemy and when he wins a second
term will tighten the screws on Merkel even tighter.
China – They know that the incoming Great Reset, which will have its Jahr Null
event in Europe likely next year, is all about consolidating power into Europe and sucking it
away from the U.S., a process Trump is dead-set against.
However, don't think for a second that the Commies that run the EU and the World Economic
Forum are teaming up with the Commies in China. Oh no, they have bigger plans than that.
And what's been pretty clear to me is Europe's delusions that it can subjugate the world
under its rubric, forcing its rules and standards on the rest of us, including China, again
allowing the U.S. to act as its proxy while it tries to maintain its standing.
I know what you're thinking. That sounds completely ludicrous.
And you're right, it is ludicrous.
But that doesn't mean it isn't true. This is clearly the mindset we're dealing with in The
Davos Crowd. They engineered a mostly-fake pandemic to accelerate their plans to remake the
world economy by burning it down.
The multi-polar world will see the fading U.S. and U.K. band together while Russia and China
continue to stitch together Asia into a coherent economic sphere. Trump is right to pull the
U.S. out of Central Asia and has gotten nothing but grief from the U.S. establishment while
Europe, through NATO, continues trying to expand to the Russian border, now with openly backing
the attempted coup in Belarus.
This was the dominant theme at Valdai and the focus of Putin's opening remarks.
"... Overspending on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program does not make America any safer. The president's military spending increase is based on the false premise that more spending equals more security. More spending may even make America less safe by spending us into bankruptcy. ..."
"... One big problem with this massive spending on one defense program is that it gives interventionist politicians the tools of war that they desire. ..."
"... While some support this flawed program no matter how much it costs and actually advocate spending more taxpayer cash on it, Americans want that $1.7 trillion spent at home and not on a transnational defense spending program to defend other nations. ..."
"... The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program is not worthy of a massive investment by the taxpayer when it does not make America safer while also being a poorly negotiated government contract that has stuck the taxpayer with a massive bill. ..."
Overspending on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program does not make America any safer. The
president's military spending increase is based on the false premise that more spending equals
more security. More spending may even make America less safe by spending us into
bankruptcy.
The F-35 program is expected to cost well over
$1 trillion when it is fully operational and deployed. That massive investment will serve
to enrich government contractors while giving interventionist politicians an offensive weapon
of war. This program was created as a "too big to fail" scheme where once the government starts
the process of making these fighter jets, they will have spent so much money that they can't
back away. The F-35 program is a bad deal for the taxpayer while promoting a policy that will
make these same taxpayers less safe.
It appears that the massive amount put into the program has purchased a lemon of a jet. The
program has been troubled from day one and is currently experiencing some padding of the
contract. On September 11, 2020,
Bloomberg reported, "the Pentagon's five-year budget plan for the F-35 falls short by as
much as $10 billion, the military's independent cost analysis unit has concluded, a new
indication that the complex fighter jet may be too costly to operate and maintain." The plan
for the F-35 for the next five years was an estimated "$78 billion for research and
development, jet procurement, operations and maintenance and military construction dedicated to
the F-35 built by Lockheed Martin Corp." This $10 billion mistake is going to fall on the
shoulders of an already overtaxed taxpayer.
One big problem with this massive spending on one defense program is that it gives
interventionist politicians the tools of war that they desire. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter
program contains a number of versions of a stealth fighter jet that can engage other aircraft
and conduct military strikes. The goal is to use these aircraft as the primary fighter jets for
the air force, navy, and marines. These can be used as offensive weapons in the hands of
politicians who desire to engage in the endless war policies that have left the United States
vulnerable to attack. This is a very expensive program that will not provide $1 trillion in
security for American citizens.
Typical with government defense contracting, there have been numerous problems that have
shifted significant increased cost onto the Pentagon.
Defense News reported recently that the contractor was trying to stick the taxpayer with
the cost of spare parts for the F-35. According to
Bloomberg , the taxpayer received more bad news: "the F-35's total 'life cycle' cost is
estimated at $1.727 trillion in current dollars." That is an insane amount of taxpayer cash and
"$1.266 trillion is for operations and support of the advanced plane that's a flying
supercomputer." When pressed by
Bloomberg , a Pentagon spokesman bragged that a Pentagon "cost analysis office projects
that the average procurement cost for an F-35, including its engines, is dropping from a
planned $109 million to $101.3 million in 2012 dollars." Only in Washington would a bureaucrat
brag about ripping off American citizens by just under $8 million less as a deal for the
taxpayer.
While some support this flawed program no matter how much it costs and actually advocate
spending more taxpayer cash on it, Americans want that $1.7 trillion spent at home and not on a
transnational defense spending program to defend other nations.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program is not worthy of a massive investment by the taxpayer
when it does not make America safer while also being a poorly negotiated government contract
that has stuck the taxpayer with a massive bill.
Many of us read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry when we were
children and remember what the main character said: "It's a question of discipline. When
you've finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet. It's very
tedious work, but very easy."
I am sure that we must keep doing this "tedious work" if we want to preserve our
common home for future generations. We must tend our planet.
The subject of environmental protection has long become a fixture on the global
agenda. But I would address it more broadly to discuss also an important task of
abandoning the practice of unrestrained and unlimited consumption – overconsumption
– in favour of judicious and reasonable sufficiency, when you do not live just for
today but also think about tomorrow.
We often say that nature is extremely vulnerable to human activity. Especially when
the use of natural resources is growing to a global dimension. However, humanity is not
safe from natural disasters, many of which are the result of anthropogenic interference.
By the way, some scientists believe that the recent outbreaks of dangerous diseases are a
response to this interference. This is why it is so important to develop harmonious
relations between Man and Nature.
No cheating please. Guess. Who said the above?
Please let us know your first guess in the comments.
Wow! What a mind blunder! Of course, it was VVP. Too much reading! Ha!! Pepe's article
has its own merits. Even more important is
this revealing editorial , "How Russophobia Wrought Death of the United States:"
"The surprise election in 2016 of Donald Trump to the White House so disturbed the
political class that it was compelled to delegitimize his presidency by alleging that it
was due to Russian interference. The relentless and irrational Russophobia to undermine
Trump by his domestic political enemies has only transpired to fatally weaken American
global power. The political squabbling and infighting has wreaked havoc on the moral
authority and legitimacy of American institutions of governance. The legislative
government, the presidency, the judiciary, the intelligence apparatus, the legacy media,
and so on. Every supposed pillar of American democracy has been eroded over the past four
years with alarming speed.
"A big part of this precipitous demise is due to Russophobia: the relentless sowing of
doubt and confusion in American institutions, primarily the presidency, with insinuations
of Russian interference. In their attempts to delegitimize Trump, his domestic enemies
among the U.S. establishment have ended up delegitimizing public esteem of American
democracy. How paradoxical! America's own worst enemy turns out to be itself ." [My
Emphasis]
I've long maintained that the enemies of the USA and its people are ALL Domestic
and have been from the outset. Lots of truth fit into that short essay!
The tone sounds like Vladimir Putin in English translation and the timing of B's post
suggests he said it during his closing speech at this year's Valdai Club meetings. Putin
has always been keen on conservation issues and often spends what free time he has in short
camping adventures. The Siberian tiger conservation program is a pet project of his.
The other possibility might be Chinese President Xi Jinping as the ideas of modest
consumption or consumption that fulfills a person's needs and of humans living in harmony
with nature appear in the speech, and these ideas have been incorporated into recent
Chinese government policies. The drive to eradicate poverty not only achieves one goal
(fulfilling people's needs) but also helps achieve the other, as impoverished communities
are often driven by forces beyond their control into marginal areas where they end up
upsetting the ecology and destroying in order to survive. Among other things his also
brings exotic pathogens in contact with humans through the disturbance of plant and animal
life (insects in particular) and the consumption of bushmeat and its trade.
Significantly in recent years much of the Earth's land surface as measured by satellites
that has become greener has been in China and India as a result of large-scale conservation
and tree-planting schemes and better use of land. This has sometimes involved relocating
entire rural communities in parts of China to areas where they can access services that
help to improve their lives. An example might be a community I read about recently that
lived on top of a small mountain or plateau where the only access to schools and markets
was through a winding series of narrow staircases cut into the mountain's sides. One child
did not start going to school until she was 11 years old because her mother was afraid that
she'd fall while using the stairs. The local authority later built a bridge connecting the
mountain to lower areas, cutting travel time from 3 hours to 1 hour. Recently the entire
community agreed to relocate and its old village on top of the mountain is to be preserved
and developed as a tourist attraction.
Note that not all the questions and answers after the speech have been transcribed
yet.
This is another of Mr.Putins masterpieces of common sense and analysis, courteously and
clearly telling truth as no global 'leader' even could let alone would.
It is an exceptionally important and wide-ranging analysis of the nature of humans, the
planet, and governance.
They Got Out of Their
Tractors
Why the so-called common people are increasingly joining the ranks of the so-called fifth column
Gazeta.ru
August 29, 2016
A
fifth column of tractors? Photo courtesy of @melnichenko_va/Twitter
The arrest of the people involved in the tractor convoy
, as well as new protest rallies in Togliatti after Nikolai
Merkushin, governor of Samara Region announced wage arrears would
"never"
be
paid off, are vivid examples of the top brass's new style of communicating with people. After flirting only four or five years
ago with the common people, as opposed to the
creacles
from
the so-called fifth column, the authorities have, in the midst of a crisis, been less and less likely to pretend they
care about the needs of rank-and-file Russians. Moreover, any reminders of problems at the bottom provokes irritation and an
increasingly repressive reaction at the top.
Previously, top officials, especially in the run-up to elections, preferred
to mollify discontent at the local level by promising people something, and from year to year, the president would even
personally solve people's specific problems, both during his televised town hall meetings (during which, for example, he dealt
with problems ranging from the water supply in a Stavropol village to the payment of wages to workers at a fish factory on
Shikotan
) and
during personal visits, as was the case in
Pikalyovo
,
where chemical plant workers also blocked a federal highway. Nowadays, on the contrary, the authorities have seemingly stopped
pretending that helping the common people is a priority for them.
The people have made no political demands in these cases. Moreover, the
main players in these stories almost certainly belong to the hypothetical loyal majority.
The people who took part in the tractor convoy against forcible land
seizures even adopted the name Polite Farmers, apparently by analogy with the patriotic meme
"polite
people,"
which gained popularity in Russia after the annexation of Crimea.
In 2011–2012, the authorities used approximately the same people to
intimidate street protesters sporting political slogans. That was when the whole country heard of
Uralvagonzavod
,
a tank manufacturer whose workers promised to travel to Moscow to teach the creacles a lesson. Subsequently, the company's
head engineer, Igor Kholmanskih, was unexpectedly
appointed
presidential
envoy to the Urals Federal Distrtict.
Back then, the cultivation of a political standoff between working people
from the provinces and slackers, "State Department agents," and self-indulgent intellectuals from the capitals seemed pivotal,
but in the aftermath of Crimea and a protracted crisis, it has almost been nullified.
The people are still important for generating good ratings [
via
wildly dubious opinion polls
--
TRR
], but it would seem that even
rhetorically they have ceased to be an object of unconditional concern on the part of the government.
Nowadays, the authorities regard the requests and especially the demands of
the so-called common people nearly as harshly as they once treated the
Bolotnaya
Square
protests.
The government does not have the money to placate the common people, so
people have to be forced to love the leadership unselfishly, in the name of stability and the supreme interests of the state.
Since politics has finally defeated the economy in Russia, instead of getting down to brass tacks and solving problems with
employment and wage arrears, the regime generously feeds people stories about war with the West. During a war, it quite
unpatriotic to demand payment of back wages or ask for pension increase. Only internal enemies would behave this way.
"We are not slaves!" Coal Miners on Hunger Strike in Gukovo
. Published on August 25, 2016,
by
Novaya
Gazeta
. Miners in Gukovo have refused a "handout" from the governor of Rostov Region and continued their hunger strike
over unpaid wages. Video by Elena Kostyuchenko. Edited by Gleb Limansky.
So the
coal
miners in Rostov
, who have continued their hunger strike under the slogan "We are not slaves," have suddenly proven to be
enemies, along with the farmers of Krasnodar, who wanted to tell the president about forcible land seizures, and the activists
defending
Torfyanka
Park
in Moscow, who were
detained
in the early hours of Monday morning for, allegedly, attempting to break Orthodox crosses
, and the people defending the
capital's
Dubki
Park
, slated for redevelopment despite the opinion of local residents, and the people who protested against the
extortionate Plato system for calculating the mileage tolls paid by
truckers
,
and just about anyone who is unhappy with something and plans to make the authorities aware of their dissatisfaction.
Grassroots initiatives, especially if they involve protests against the
actions or inaction of the authorities, are not only unwelcome now, but are regarded as downright dangerous, almost as actions
against the state. This hypothesis is borne out by the silence of the parliamentary opposition parties. In the midst of an
election campaign, they have not even attempted to channel popular discontent in certain regions and make it work to their
advantage at the ballot box.
The distinction between the so-called fifth column and the other four has
blurred.
Nowadays, the fifth column can be a woman who asks a governor about back
wages. Someone who defends a city park. Farmers. Coal miners. Even the workers of
Uralvagonzavod
,
which in recent years has been on the verge of bankruptcy. The contracts the state had been throwing the company's way have
not helped, apparently.
If the authorities, especially local authorities simply afraid to show
federal authorities they are incapable of coping with problems, continue to operate only through a policy of intimidation,
they might soon be the fifth column themselves, if only because, sooner or later, they will find themselves in the minority.
Translated by the
Russian Reader.
Thanks
to
Sean
Guillory
f
or the heads-up
"... We, in Russia, went through a fairly long period where foreign funds were very much the main source for creating and financing non-governmental organisations. Of course, not all of them pursued self-serving or bad goals, or wanted to destabilise the situation in our country, interfere in our domestic affairs, or influence Russia's domestic and, sometimes, foreign policy in their own interests. Of course not. ..."
Genuine democracy and civil society cannot be "imported." I have said so many times. They
cannot be a product of the activities of foreign "well-wishers," even if they "want the best
for us." In theory, this is probably possible. But, frankly, I have not yet seen such a thing
and do not believe much in it. We see how such imported democracy models function. They are
nothing more than a shell or a front with nothing behind them, even a semblance of sovereignty.
People in the countries where such schemes have been implemented were never asked for their
opinion, and their respective leaders are mere vassals. As is known, the overlord decides
everything for the vassal. To reiterate, only the citizens of a particular country can
determine their public interest.
We, in Russia, went through a fairly long period where foreign funds were very much the
main source for creating and financing non-governmental organisations. Of course, not all of
them pursued self-serving or bad goals, or wanted to destabilise the situation in our country,
interfere in our domestic affairs, or influence Russia's domestic and, sometimes, foreign
policy in their own interests. Of course not.
There were sincere enthusiasts among independent civic organisations (they do exist), to
whom we are undoubtedly grateful. But even so, they mostly remained strangers and ultimately
reflected the views and interests of their foreign trustees rather than the Russian citizens.
In a word, they were a tool with all the ensuing consequences.
A strong, free and independent civil society is nationally oriented and sovereign by
definition. It grows from the depth of people's lives and can take different forms and
directions. But it is a cultural phenomenon, a tradition of a particular country, not the
product of some abstract "transnational mind" with other people's interests behind it.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the General Services Administration (GSA)
undermined the Trump transition team by violating a memorandum of understanding between the
Trump transition team and the GSA - when they complied with requests from the FBI and special
counsel Robert Mueller's office to provide private records on members of Trump's team ,
according to a Senate report released on Friday.
The majority staff report from both the Senate Committee on Finance and the Committee on
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs claims that officials from both the FBI and
Mueller's office " secretly sought and received access to the private records of Donald J.
Trump's presidential transition team, Trump for America, Inc. "
"They did so," the report continues, "despite the terms of a memorandum of understanding
between the Trump transition team and the General Services Administration.. . -- the
executive agency responsible for providing services to both candidates' transition teams --
that those records were the transition team's private property that would not be retained at
the conclusion of the transition."
According to the report, the GSA - without notifying the White House - reached out
to the FBI following Michael Flynn's resignation as national security adviser and offered to
retain records from the Trump transition team in early 2017. The records compiled eventually
made their way into Mueller's office, according to the report.
"At bottom," continues the report, " the GSA and the FBI undermined the transition process
by preserving Trump transition team records contrary to the terms of the memorandum of
understanding, hiding that fact from the Trump transition team, and refusing to provide the
team with copies of its own records."
" These actions have called into question the GSA's role as a neutral service provider, and
those doubts have consequences ," the report reads. "Future presidential transition teams must
have confidence that their use of government resources and facilities for internal
communications and deliberations -- including key decisions such as nominations, staffing, and
significant policy changes -- will not expose them to exploitation by third parties, including
political opponents ."
1 play_arrow
911bodysnatchers322 , 4 hours ago
1) Was this illegal surveillance?
2) Was this spying before a FISA warrant was given?
3) Did this occur before the special council was incepted (ie before may 2017)?
4) Which attorneys on his team requested this information?
5) Which US employees at GSA approved the FBI's request?
6) Why did the GSA approve the request, despite the MOU from TTT?
7) Will the employees cry out for mommy or for God when they are executed for treason
(participants in seditious conspiracy against a lawful president)?
8) If they aren't executed, will president trump please give any us citizen a pre-pardon
for carrying out justice against these employees after they are fired, and the sum total of
their assets seized and divested to the us taxpayer base and they are homeless?
Thank you congressmen. Reclaiming our time
3O4jF"> Macho Latte play_arrow Mzhen , 5 hours ago
November 29, 2019 – The history of Flynn prosecutor Brandon Van Grack – from
the Special Counsel's Office to the prosecution of Flynn
It can't be repeated enough...the Weissman "investigation" and Clinton campaign were doing
exactly what President Trump was falsely accused of...using disinformation obtained from
RUSSIAN sources (the Steele Dossier) to influence an election and undermine the peaceful
transfer of power.
booboo , 4 hours ago
more specifically they knew the charge would not stick because you can't charge someone
for obstruction for calling out your prosecutor.
4whatitsworth , 3 hours ago
Mr Muller please confirm that the name of the firm that produced the Christopher Steele
dossier was Fusion GPS.. Muller hmmm Fusion GPS "I'm not familiar with that," - what a lying
peice of ****!
Metastatic Debt , 3 hours ago
Feds only solve crimes they manufacture or entrap for political gain, gain internally for
promos or externally for glory.
That agency was founded by a black mailing, cross dressing weirdo.
No wonder it's corrupt. That was Its core makeup.
UserLevel9000 , 4 hours ago
He was a frontman. He didn't even read the report. Didn't you see the interview?
Short of killing him, our government exhausted all resources in order to remove Trump.
What's the term? Ah yes, a ******* coup.
Im 44yo but I hope I live long enough for the historians to connect the dots and write the
story. Much like JFK, all involved will be dead and will never pay for their crimes against
this country and attack on one of the most important protections we have as a Republic- a
peaceful transfer of power.
Mzhen , 4 hours ago
Who, specifically, has his name on the Mueller team letter to the GSA. Brandon Van Grack.
The same prosecutor who spent years persecuting General Flynn, before being forced to
withdraw from the case. The same Brandon Van Grack who was part of a failed sting operation
against George Papadopoulos.
Totally_Disillusioned , 3 hours ago
The ENTIRE bureaucracy was against Trump and made EVERY EFFORT to sabotage, obstruct and
deny President Trump's full authority over the Executive Branch.
High Vigilante , 4 hours ago
Another scandal by globalists and Demsheviks every single day. Each worse than
Watergate.
Contagion Deleverage , 4 hours ago
The implications of Mueller having access to SECRET information pertaining to Donal Trump
is remarkable and powerful. I believe that this is the source for leaking important and
damaging information on Trump, his closest advisors, and critically, their plans and
capabilities!
Reaper , 4 hours ago
The prosecutor was the criminal.
Secret Weapon , 5 hours ago
The trash in DC really hates the average American. I guess they meant it when they called
us "deplorable".
chubbar , 3 hours ago
When you say "GSA did this" or "FBI did that", you are being lazy in your reporting. There
are actual PEOPLE who made those decisions, not some nameless entity. What has to happen is
that these actual people need to be found, charged and tried for these crimes. Otherwise,
let's just call everything legal if no laws are to be enforced and quit bringing up the
details of their treachery.
ConanTheContrarian1 , 1 hour ago
Ever read a gov't document? "It was decided....", "It seemed best....", etc. NEVER "I
decided" or "Joe and Maxine decided". Ten thousand coverups and misdirections per
department.
getsometoo , 4 hours ago
How do these bureautards get off thinking they're going dispose a duly elected President?
Seriously, don't they understand the people would never allow it. What would it take for the
people to utterly wipe out the FBI? To execute every damn one of them for treason? There's
only around 35-40,000 of them. We could hang every damn one of them in a weekend.
Sonofabitches. These people must absolutely lose their jobs. Then the guilty leadership must
hang.
Sigh. , 4 hours ago
So. GSA is Deep State. Never would've figured that.
Barrock , 4 hours ago
Even the GSA is part of the swamp! Who would've figured? The USA needs to cut the annual
budget hugely. The government needs a complete rehaul.
Walking Turtle , 3 minutes ago
Seems Mr. Trump is positioned now to do pretty much that.
His recent creation per EO of GSA "Schedule F" employment lays waste to the "non-fireable"
Senior Executive Service's stranglehold on Executive Branch administrative process. Sched F
appointees are strictly at-will, serving at the sole pleasure of the President. Failure to
serve as directed carries severe consequences, including jail time.
Moreover, a Sched F appointee can reportedly be placed above the SES wonk at the head of a
recalcitrant agency. (Currently that means ALL of them - 80+ iirc.) Puts the BRIT-LOYAL
Senior Executive Service under actual Constitution-loyal Executive Branch supervision.
Betsy and Thomas d of American Intelligence Media (.mp3 podcast @link) have plenty good
reason LOVE this, as does YT. The SES Policy Wonk Armee, otoh,
does not .
Panic in DC. Long time coming; HERE NOW. DC-region dentists are gonna' clean right UP with
all the gnashing of teeth and consequent self-inflicted damage to the dentition of those
Swamp Rats imvho. And that is all. 0{;-)o[
Bigboot , 36 minutes ago
What happened to all the expos\'es of the Hunter Laptop we were told were coming out?
Isn't it amazing, stultifying and incredibly nightmarish that we are heading into the
election and NOT ONE of the Democrat criminals has been indicted? My God, there's
something
really rotten in the state of America (cf Shakespeare, I know America is not a state).
Total corruption at all levels. God save us from the Government and all its rotten
agencies.
gcjohns1971 , 40 minutes ago
Government does not believe in Democracy or in the Republic.
They work for other masters. And they assert exclusive right to choose which ones.
Good questions to ask include:
Which ones?
On what basis is their choosing?
What is in it for the rest of us?
Why should we continue to enable a "government" on such a self-serving basis?
Leguran , 44 minutes ago
These actions have called into question the GSA's role as a neutral service provider, and
those doubts have consequences?????
No ****! Who the hell is supposed to trust government when those in top positions feel
free to do exactly what they please. That MOU was an agreement, the government's word.
Republicans in the Senate, you are all dirt bags with no values. At least the Democrats do
not claim to have values.
That court order directed him to stop claiming the "Russian troll" company, Comcord (
their ads were typical clickbait , not 'meddling') was connected to the Russian
government - because he had produced no evidence at all to substantiate that.
He also would have had access to information that casted serious doubt on the alleged
hacking.. nevermind 'collusion' - they NEVER had any evidence of a hack.
How do we know, apart from the lack of any credible evidence ever actually produced?
Well, for one, the testimony of the president of CrowdStrike which Adam Schiff
deliberately suppressed during impeachment.
@Menes
losphere that came the closest to ruling the whole world. And China knows that Russia is a
part of European civilization, that will switch sides as soon as geopolitics and geoeconomics
change.
Au contraire , the fact that NATO exists is why Russia has to partner with China, to
ensure its own national survival. If anything, it's NATO that has no feasible future because
the USA is not even a European country, masquerading as the "protector" of Europe, against
Russia! The Chinese saying "one mountain cannot contain two tigers" applies to the USA because
it has no business being the dominant power in NATO to keep Russia out of Europe.
Russia is too weak to disengage with EU. Technologial superiority is still on the side of EU
and the USA (EU mostly acts as a vassal of the USA.) They need to suffer this humiliation, and
try to gain strength.
Sergey Lavrov, Russia's Foreign Minister, is the world's foremost diplomat. The son of an
Armenian father and a Russian mother, he's just on another level altogether. Here, once again,
we may be able to see why.
Let's start with the annual meeting of the Valdai Club , Russia's premier think tank. Here we
may follow the
must-watch presentation of the Valdai annual report on "The Utopia of a Diverse World",
featuring, among others, Lavrov, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, Dominic Lieven
of the University of Cambridge and Yuri Slezkine of UCLA/Berkeley.
It's a rarity to be able to share what amounts to a Himalayan peak in terms of serious
political debate. We have, for instance, Lieven – who, half in jest, defined the Valdai
report as "Tolstoyian, a little anarchical" – focusing on the current top two, great
interlocking challenges: climate change and the fact that "350 years of Western and 250 years
of Anglo-American predominance are coming to an end."
As we see the "present world order fading in front of our eyes", Lieven notes a sort of
"revenge of the Third World". But then, alas, Western prejudice sets in all over again, as he
defines China reductively as a "challenge".
Mearsheimer neatly remembers we have lived, successively, under a bipolar, unipolar and now
multipolar world: with China, Russia and the US, "Great Power Politics is back on the
table."
He correctly assesses that after the dire experience of the "century of humiliation, the
Chinese will make sure they are really powerful." And that will set the stage for the US to
deploy a "highly-aggressive containment policy", just like it did against the USSR, that "may
well end up in a shooting match".
"I trust Arnold more than the EU"
Lavrov, in his introductory remarks, had
explained that in realpolitik terms, the world "cannot be run from one center alone." He
took time to stress the "meticulous, lengthy and sometimes ungrateful" work of diplomacy.
It was later, in one of his interventions, that he unleashed the
real bombshell (starting at 1:15:55; in Russian, overdubbed in English): "When the European
Union is speaking as a superior, Russia wants to know, can we do any business with Europe?"
He mischievously quotes Schwarzenegger, "who in his movies always said 'Trust me'. So I
trust Arnold more than the European Union".
And that leads to the definitive punch line: "The people who are responsible for foreign
policy in the West do not understand the necessity of mutual respect in dialogue. And then
probably for some time we have to stop talking to them." After all, European Commission
president Ursula von der Leyen had stated, on the record, that for the EU, "there is no
geopolitical partnership with modern Russia".
Lavrov went even further in a stunning, wide-ranging
interview with Russian radio stations whose translation deserves to be carefully read in
full.
Here is just one of the most crucial snippets:
Lavrov: "No matter what we do, the West will try to hobble and restrain us, and undermine
our efforts in the economy, politics, and technology. These are all elements of one
approach."
Question: "Their national security strategy states that they will do so."
Lavrov: "Of course it does, but it is articulated in a way that decent people can still
let go unnoticed, but it is being implemented in a manner that is nothing short of
outrageous."
Question: You, too, can articulate things in a way that is different from what you would
really like to say, correct?"
Lavrov: "It's the other way round. I can use the language I'm not usually using to get the
point across. However, they clearly want to throw us off balance, and not only by direct
attacks on Russia in all possible and conceivable spheres by way of unscrupulous competition,
illegitimate sanctions and the like, but also by unbalancing the situation near our borders,
thus preventing us from focusing on creative activities. Nevertheless, regardless of the
human instincts and the temptations to respond in the same vein, I'm convinced that we must
abide by international law."
Moscow stands unconditionally by international law – in contrast with the proverbial
"rules of the liberal international order" jargon parroted by NATO and its minions such as the
Atlantic Council.
And here it is all
over again , a report extolling NATO to "Ramp Up on Russia", blasting Moscow's "aggressive
disinformation and propaganda campaigns against the West, and unchecked adventurism in the
Middle East, Africa, and Afghanistan."
The Atlantic Council insists on how those pesky Russians have once again defied "the
international community by using an illegal chemical weapon to poison opposition leader Alexei
Navalny. NATO's failure to halt Russia's aggressive behavior puts the future of the liberal
international order at risk."
Only fools falling for the blind leading the blind syndrome don't know that these liberal
order "rules" are set by the Hegemon alone, and can be changed in a flash according to the
Hegemon's whims.
So it's no wonder a running joke in Moscow is "if you don't listen to Lavrov, you will
listen to Shoigu." Sergey Shoigu is Russia's Minister of Defense, supervising all those
hypersonic weapons the US industrial-military complex can only dream about.
The crucial point is even with so much NATO-engendered hysteria, Moscow could not give a
damn because of its de facto military supremacy. And that freaks Washington and Brussels out
even more.
What's left is Hybrid War eruptions following the RAND corporation-prescribed
non-stop harassment and "unbalancing" of Russia, in Belarus, the southern Caucasus and
Kyrgyzstan – complete with sanctions on Lukashenko and on Kremlin officials for the
Navalny "poisoning".
"You do not negotiate with monkeys"
What Lavrov just made it quite explicit was a long time in the making. "Modern Russia" and
the EU were born almost at the same time. On a personal note, I experienced it in an
extraordinary fashion. "Modern Russia" was born in December 1991 – when I was on the road
in India, then Nepal and China. When I arrived in Moscow via the Trans-Siberian in February
1992, the USSR was no more. And then, flying back to Paris, I arrived at a European Union born
in that same February.
One of Valdai's leaders
correctly argues that the daring concept of a "Europe stretching from Lisbon to
Vladivostok" coined by Gorbachev in 1989, right before the collapse of the USSR, unfortunately
"had no document or agreement to back it up."
And yes, "Putin searched diligently for an opportunity to implement the partnership with the
EU and to further rapprochement. This continued from 2001 until as late as 2006."
We all remember when Putin, in 2010, proposed exactly the same concept, a common house
from Lisbon to Vladivostok , and was flatly rebuffed by the EU. It's very important to
remember this was four years before the Chinese would finalize their own concept of the New
Silk Roads.
Afterwards, the only way was down. The final Russia-EU summit took place in Brussels in
January 2014 – an eternity in politics.
The fabulous intellectual firepower gathered at the Valdai is very much aware that the Iron
Curtain 2.0 between Russia and the EU simply won't disappear.
And all this while the IMF, The Economist and even that
Thucydides fallacy proponent admit that China is already, in fact, the world's top
economy.
Russia and China share an enormously long border. They are engaged in a complex,
multi-vector "comprehensive strategic partnership". That did not develop because the
estrangement between Russia and the EU/NATO forced Moscow to pivot East, but mostly because the
alliance between the world's neighboring top economy and top military power makes total
Eurasian sense – geopolitically and geoeconomically.
And that totally corroborates Lieven's diagnosis of the end of "250 years of Anglo-American
predominance."
It was up to inestimable military analyst Andrey Martyanov, whose latest book I reviewed as
a must
read , to come up with the utmost deliciously
devastating assessment of Lavrov's "We had enough" moment:
"Any professional discussion between Lavrov and former gynecologist [actually
epidemiologist] such as von der Leyen, including Germany's Foreign Minister Maas, who is a
lawyer and a party worm of German politics is a waste of time. Western "elites" and
"intellectuals" are simply on a different, much lower level, than said Lavrov. You do not
negotiate with monkeys, you treat them nicely, you make sure that they are not abused, but
you don't negotiate with them, same as you don't negotiate with toddlers.
They want to have their Navalny as their toy – let them. I call on Russia to start
wrapping economic activity up with EU for a long time. They buy Russia's hydrocarbons and
hi-tech, fine. Other than that, any other activity should be dramatically reduced and
necessity of the Iron Curtain must not be doubted anymore."
As much as Washington is not "agreement-capable", in the words of President Putin, so is the
EU, says Lavrov: "We should stop to orient ourselves toward European partners and care about
their assessments."
Not only Russia knows it: the overwhelming majority of the Global South also knows it.
Russia is a European Country with a European Culture they should leave the door open.
Politics change, and it would be a terrible shame if the West lost Russia and vice versa.
Russia is a European Country with a European Culture they should leave the door open.
Politics change, and it would be a terrible shame if the West lost Russia and vice
versa.
Most of the Europeans I know (and I know quite a few because I live in Europe) do not
consider Russians to be European. It's not the Russians who have closed the door they are
merely ensuring it doesn't hit them in the nose. That is indeed a shame, because, as Escobar
suggests, the EU is setting itself to be colonised by the global south, as is the U.K. and
the Hegemon. 1992 and beyond was indeed a great squandering of opportunity.
Look at the EU's persistent irrationality trying to negotiate with the UK. How long have
Brexit talks been blocked by EU Elite intransigence?
They cannot even cope internally. The Dark Heart of Europe keeps trying to kill
freedom & individual rights. In response, the Christian Populist members of the EU have
positioned themselves to veto Merkel's fascist budget trap. (1)
While all 27 EU heads of state and government approved the budget and recovery package
at a summit in July, national parliaments must still ratify the budget and a so-called Own
Resources Decision, which provides the EU with legal guarantees from its member countries
regarding budget revenues.
Council President Charles Michel declared triumphantly that he had succeeded in ensuring
there would be strong rule-of-law protections as part of the package. But Hungarian Prime
Minister Viktor Orbán and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki also claimed
victory, saying the wording had been softened enough to give them the ability to veto any
proposed regulation.
Everyone should abandon attempts to do business with the EU. The only solution is to end
the flailing unworkable mess in an peaceful and orderly manner.
Of course, the SJW Sharia Globalist MegaCorporations hate that idea. It would derail their
goal of undercutting infidel (Christian & Jewish) workers via faux-refugee migration.
Culturally, the old Communist East that is within the EU, has more in common with Russia
than with the Western Europeans
Tho it is taking time for the old anti-Russian instincts to fade away
And even within the West, there are regions and countries – the
perhaps-soon-independent Flanders, and much of Italy as things proceed – for whom this
also is in part true
Russia is NOT Europe. Anyone who considers this either has no clue of history and has
never been there, or both, or has just been to Moscow for a while and has the wrong
impression.
Contemporary Russia is a military descendand of the Golden Horde, (Altun Orda), absorbing
the tartar, nogai and kalmyk nobility by resettling them to Moscow upon conquest. Their
medieval rulers had tartar titles such as beylerbeg, used tartar outfits and arabic script on
their coins. Russian state organised its existence based on military districts similar to
those of the mongols (hence Belarus for example – white russia – white is the
mongolian west wing of the army district in the mongol system, before that belarus was call
Zhmutia).
Russia is also spiritual descendant of the Byzantine and Bulgarian states (bulgarians such
as Saint Cyprian and Grigori Tsamblak actually delivered byzantine ortodoxy rites to russia
due to similarity of languages, not greeks). Old church slavonic is actually old bulgarian,
and this greek-slavonic culture has its peculiarities – in the eastern rites, the
person closest to god is not the richest , but the one who has more faith. This in
consequence makes those societies look for "saints" as rulers, and be never content with the
people they rule them. Stability is achieved only with mild tyranny or the presence of
extraordinary rulers, hence the economy is always behind the collective west. Anyway, the
topic is too damn long, the short story is – don't ever beleive Russia is part of
europe such as austria for example.
Russia is not part of Europe. It is something else – just like Malta, that speak
semitic and the locals look like north africans, but some people say it is Europe.
The westernization of the muscovite tsardom only started in the 17-th century, and the
process has been stopped several times (napoleon, one of the alexander kings, bolsheviks, now
putin). the westerners still beleive Russia can be subdued because the slavs are savages and
lack economy.
Eastern ortodoxy brings a peculiar mindset, that is hard to grasp by western politicians, and
it is not materialistic – it brings things like being content with your position in the
world without wanting more stuff, and the same time each one has to reach god by himself and
no other authority is valid. Pepe doens't grasp this aspect – the overwhelming
non-commercial, truth seeking part of the russians that westerners cannot see because of
savage and poor looks and blunt directness. It will play us all a bad joke in the next
war.
Mearsheimer did nice work popping the pus out of the Israel lobby so we could all go, Ew,
so it's sad to see him fixate on discredited CIA realist doctrine when the civilized world
has moved on:
De Zayas should have been at Valdai instead of Mearsheimer because this is what the G-192
thinks, that is, what everybody thinks. If the SCO has to enforce this consensus at gunpoint,
they're fine with that. We should be too. It's everybody in the world including us against
the CIA regime, hostis humani generis.
Great Pepe Escobar. Excellent article. See '75 years after 'Stunde Null,' collapse in
Russian-German relations is driven by Berlin's renewed desire to dominate Europe' by Glenn
Diesen explaining Germany role on that.
Some stupid (that is to say all of them) loud mouthed low browed EU bigwig only needs to
get a bit too fresh and uppity with Turkey's Erdogan, (you know the kind of thing, some third
rate tosser starts sounding off about 'human rights' to make himself look big and pompous),
and therefore tick Erdogan off a bit too much, for Erdogan to retaliate by unleashing 3
million plus 'refugees' into the EU. Knowing the absolutely appalling lack of caliber and
intelligence of EU bigwigs, this will inevitably happen in the near future. Just watch this
space.
That day will certainly head the eventual and inevitable dissolution of the EU.
It's just all so fucking clear and obvious to anyone who's got a brain.
The trouble with this 'analysis' is very very simple:
Namely, that the brainless *SHIT* which runs the EU – who, by, the way are real deal
undemocratic unelected unaccountable tyrants and dictators – *absolutely* could not
give a fuck about *real* ethnic genetic Europeans.
All they care about are third worlders, of whom they wish to stuff as many into the EU as
possible. Remember Merkel?
Most intelligent Europeans know this.
The Russian high command knows this.
The Chinese know this.
Culturally, the old Communist East that is within the EU, has more in common with Russia
than with the Western Europeans
From another point of view the old West has now more in common with communist-like
totalitarian zeitgeist and rule of propaganda then old communist East, only colours changed
from red to anti-white globo homo.
Not happy with that having experienced 17 years of vanishing red rule, now seeing it
rebranded on the rise again in one of the EU bound countries affected (Czechia). Just
saying.
@Steven80
hat is the stuff that can be found in prayers ahead of meals yap, redneck and conservative
assholes and meaning of them has nothing to do with availability of Mac Donald's or home
deliveries.
For us death, hunger, desperation and bestial violence are fresh memories. They are in each
and every family. We know where suffering came from and because of which of earthly reasons.
("Why" is a much deeper question and the answer is in reflection inside Orthodox Christian
teachings.)
So, long story short. That's why S. Lavrov, since nobody there cares about warnings, now
even more politely says: "F ** k off, you lawless hypocrites."
We in the West therefore live under the unyielding yoke of Modernism, whereby we have
become so used to its shallow, arid materialism, that has been carefully and artfully crafted
for us over the past 150 years; its wall-to-wall advertising and huckstering; its population
of zombified careerists and status-seekers, that we are now like the proverbial goldfish in
its bowl, blissfully unaware that there is a wider, more varied and fulfilling world outside
the narrow confines it inhabits.
One thinks of Hamlet: "I could be bound in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite
space, were it not that I have bad dreams".
I know many Europeans too, and many Russians. Contrary to what you say, the Europeans I
know consider Russians to be Europeans. The fact that nearly all Russians in Europe have
white skin, blue eyes, blonde to light brown hair, come from the same Continent, and share
European values, helps a lot!
Eastern ortodoxy brings a peculiar mindset, that is hard to grasp by western
politicians, and it is not materialistic – it brings things like being content with
your position in the world without wanting more stuff, and the same time each one has to
reach god by himself and no other authority is valid.
Bollocks. I know many Russians personally. They are indistinguishable from western
Europeans, to me they are just like Finns and Swedes, even the accent.
Every time the Russians leave the door open, it ends up with a Western attempt on Russia.
The West represents roughly 10% of the world population, is declining rapidly and brings
nothing to the table except promises of nuisance. If I were Russian, I would ditch relations
with the globohomo West and seek partnerships among the 90%.
If you speak of the capacity to project her troops on any point on Earth, you're right.
The thing is, they don't need it and probably regard it as vanity of fools. If on the other
hand you consider their capacity to incinerate you before you incinerate them, well, dream
on.
@MLK
this was a gift to Russia and Germany, but it's much worse than that. Why isn't anyone else
curious as to who got what in return?
The blockage of Nordstream 2 is about The Dark Heart of Europe not Russia. Christian
Europe is terrified of Mutti Mullah Merkel's highly authoritarian regime. Why would any of the
V4 nations accept energy dependency on flows via Germany?
This is one of Putin's few serious errors. He would be much better off pushing gas projects
that flowed through Christian European nations thus allowing them leverage against German
anti-Christian SJW aggression.
Current US is a colossus with the feet of clay. Dems in their mad attempts to undermine
Trump succeeded in undermining America. Just wait for November 3.
Putin's and Xi's policy towards the US follows the saying "when you see your enemy
committing suicide, do not interfere". The same applies to the EU, as well as Brexited UK.
Times are a-changing. The West is destroying itself and behaving as if it's it is still hale
and healthy. It was said that when God wishes to punish someone, He takes away that person's
mind. This applies to countries, particularly to the Empires.
That's a deranged dream of neocons, and it won't come true. The policies of Russia and China
are sane and pragmatic, whereas the policies of the Empire and its sidekicks are suicidal.
As far as civilizational divide goes, Russia is neither Europe nor Asia, it is a separate
civilization. When the US and Europe succeed in destroying themselves, many Russians would miss
them due to cultural ties with their predecessors, but that won't drive Russian policies. Not
just Putin's (in fact, he appears to have a soft spot for Europe, characteristic of his
generation), but policies of whoever runs Russia after him. There would be no gorbys or
yeltsins any more.
Europe is a glove on the US hand and is easily led around by its nose by the CIA and MI6
that infest the MSM and run one false flag after another.
Politicians in the EU are mediocre creatures that crave the dollars stuffed into their
pockets by the US. They are enjoying the ride while it lasts until they go down with the
US.
@Steven80
es who make up modern Sweden–the Scanians, the Goths and the Svear. Both Kiev and
Novgorod were founded by them and the original, etymological basis for Russia is "Rus". The
royal line, beginning with Rurik and the nobility of the Rus , were of a Scandinavian-Slavic
blend.
Though Muscovy may have later become dominated by the descendants of the Mongols and their
allies, the northern, forested part of Russia features a native set of peoples who only rarely
evince the features of their fully conquered brethren in the steppe lands of the south. In all
truth, Putin, whom I believe was born in Tver, could easily pass for one of my Nordic cousins
And that is the blue-eyed truth.
I'm a British Brexit voter – primarily because the EU is run by arseholes with an
absolutely loathing for any sort of democratic accountability.
So Russia's impression of the EU is totally realistic.
For four years I have had to watch the spectacle of the UK trying to form a fair deal, when
the EU's explicit goal has been to punish the UK for leaving pour encourager les autres.
What a waste of time. The EU only understands blunt force and blunt actions.
Indonesia Refuses To Host American Spy Planes Amid Sino-US Cold War
The US and China are smack dab in the middle of a new Cold War. The observation in itself
should not be startling to readers - as President Trump's trade war metamorphosed into a
technology war over the Chinese tech companies' global dominance. Rapidly deteriorating
relations between both superpowers, especially since the virus pandemic, has resulted in
increased military action in East Asia.
In the last couple of years, we've pointed out the US has constructed a Lockheed Martin
F-35 stealth jet "friends circle" around China. More recently, there's been a significant
uptick in US spy planes changing their transponder codes to disguise themselves during
operations near China.
In the attempt to increase spy plane presence in East Asia, US officials made multiple
"high-level" attempts in July and August to Indonesia's top defense and government
officials to clear the way to allow Boeing P-8 Poseidon maritime surveillance planes to
land and refuel on the Southeast Asia country.
Four senior Indonesian officials familiar with the matter told Reuters that defense
officials rejected the US proposal because Indonesia has a well-established policy of
foreign policy neutrality - and does not permit foreign militaries to operate across its
archipelago.
Reuters notes the P-8 "plays a central role in keeping an eye on China's military
activity in the South China Sea, most of which Beijing claims as its territory."
Indonesia rejected the US spy plane presence because it has developed increased economic
and investment ties with China over the years.
"It does not want to take sides in the conflict and is alarmed by growing tensions
between the two superpowers, and by the militarization of the South China Sea," Indonesia's
Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi told Reuters.
"We don't want to get trapped by this rivalry," Retno said in an interview in early
September. "Indonesia wants to show all that we are ready to be your partner."
Dino Patti Djalal, a former Indonesian ambassador to the US, said the "very aggressive
anti-China policy" projected by the US has become troubling for Indonesia.
"It's seen as out-of-place," Djalal told Reuters. "We don't want to be duped into an
anti-China campaign. Of course, we maintain our independence, but there is deeper economic
engagement, and China is now the most impactful country in the world for Indonesia."
Greg Poling, a Southeast Asia analyst from the Washington, DC-based Center for Strategic
and International Studies, said Washington's attempt to pressure Indonesia into giving up
land rights so US spy planes can fly in and out of the country is an example of "clumsy
overreach."
"It's an indication of how little folks in the US government understand Indonesia,"
Poling told Reuters. "There's a clear ceiling to what you can do, and when it comes to
Indonesia, that ceiling is putting boots on the ground."
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Both China and the US have recently ramped up military exercises in the South China Sea.
The US has increased naval freedom of navigation operations, submarine deployments, and spy
plane flights, while China has increased naval missions in the region.
To sum up, the new cold war has pressured Southeast Asian countries to take sides; they
must choose between the US and or China. As for Indonesia, they quickly decided to be
neutral with a lean towards China. Does this mean China's gravity in terms of its size and
its influence is overwhelming the US?
"From the onset of the pandemic in Russia, we have focused on preserving lives and
ensuring safety of our people as our key values. This was an informed choice dictated by
our culture and spiritual traditions, and our complex, sometimes dramatic, history. If we
think back to the great demographic losses we suffered in the 20th century, we had no other
choice but to fight for every person and the future of every Russian family.
"So, we did our best to preserve the health and the lives of our people, to help parents
and children, as well as senior citizens and those who lost their jobs, to maintain
employment as much as possible, to minimise damage to the economy, to support millions of
entrepreneurs who run small or family businesses.
"Perhaps, like everyone else, you are closely following daily updates on the pandemic
around the world. Unfortunately, the coronavirus has not retreated and still poses a major
threat. Probably, this unsettling background intensifies the sense, like many people feel,
that a whole new era is about to begin and that we are not just on the verge of dramatic
changes, but an era of tectonic shifts in all areas of life.
"We see the rapidly, exponential development of the processes that we have repeatedly
discussed at the Valdai Club before. Thus, six years ago, in 2014, we spoke about this
issue when we discussed the theme The World Order: New Rules or a Game Without Rules. So,
what is happening now? Regrettably, the game without rules is becoming increasingly
horrifying and sometimes seems to be a fait accompli."
This is the 17th session of the Valdai Club, and I ask: Where is there an equivalent in
the so-called democracies of the West which are allegedly the guardians of free speech and
debate, where there supposedly exists a "marketplace of ideas"?
The Q & A portion of Putin's Valdai Club Speech transcript
have been posted, and they run longer than his speech. In his first query, I completely agree
with Putin that too many people have yet to learn the fundamental lesson the pandemic ought
to have taught:
"However, the pandemic is playing into our hands when it comes to raising our awareness of
the importance of joining forces against severe global crises. Unfortunately, it has not yet
taught humanity to come together completely, as we must do in such situations."
But his answer wasn't directed at ignorant citizens. Putin's ire was directed at the
Outlaw US Empire:
"I am not referring now to all these sanctions against Russia; forget about that, we will
get over it. But many other countries that have suffered and are still suffering from the
coronavirus do not even need any help that may come from outside, they just need the
restrictions lifted, at least in the humanitarian sphere, I repeat, concerning the supply of
medicines, equipment, credit resources, and the exchange of technologies. These are
humanitarian things in their purest form. But no, they have not abolished any
restrictions, citing some considerations that have nothing to do with the humanitarian
component – but at the same time, everyone is talking about humanism .
"I would say we need to be more honest with each other and abandon double standards. I am
sure that if people hear me now on the media, they are probably finding it difficult to
disagree with what I have just said, difficult to deny it. Deep down in their hearts, in
their minds, everyone is probably thinking, 'Yes, right, of course.' However, for
political reasons, publicly, they will still say, 'No, we must keep restrictions on Iran,
Venezuela, against Assad .' What does Assad even have to do with this when it is ordinary
people who suffer? At least, give them medicines, give them technology, at least a small,
targeted loan for medicine. No." [My Emphasis]
If I could speak to Putin, I'd tell him that they have no hearts, they are soulless,
completely bereft of any sense of morality, and cannot be reasoned with whatsoever. They are
ghouls, incapable of being shamed or made to feel guilt. You look at them and see a human,
but they're not human at all; they are parasites cloaked in human form. They differ little
from the Nazis of 75+ years ago and need to be eliminated once and for all. The pandemic has
fully exposed them for what they are.
@134 Has anybody seen a comment yet from the Honorable Chrystia Freeland or the Lima Group
regarding the election result in Bolivia? Maybe they are too busy strangling Venezuela.
Re: "...Thus, six years ago, in 2014, we spoke about this issue when we discussed the
theme The World Order: New Rules or a Game Without Rules. So, what is happening now?
Regrettably, the game without rules is becoming increasingly horrifying and sometimes
seems to be a fait accompli."
Putin said this virtually in the same breath directly after his previous paragraph you
excerpted where he speaks of the serious ongoing challenges of the coronavirus pandemic.
What that says to me is that he is hinting with his trademark subtlety that he thinks the
CV pandemic may not be a naturally arising event. In other words, a plandemic.
Yes, that's the ongoing rhetorical battle between the Collectivist nations who uphold the
sanctity of International Law and the Neoliberal Nations controlled by Financial Parasites
that can't survive under a functional International Law System. That distinction is
constantly becoming clearer particularly to those residing within the Neoliberal nations as
they watch their lives being destroyed. IMO, we're on the cusp of entering the most critical
decade of this century which will determine humanity's condition when 2101 is reached.
"... The sustained tosh from the good old boys at state, cia, fbi & nsa isn't worthy of comment, given that it is 100% evidence-free accusations which surprise surprise 'just happens' to align with these provenly corrupt organisations' most prioritsed foreign policy goals. ..."
Last month, national security prosecutors at the Justice Department were told to look at any
ongoing investigations involving Iran or Iranian nationals with an eye toward making them
public.
The push to announce Iran-related cases has caused internal alarm, these people said, with
some law enforcement officials fearing that senior Justice Department officials want to
reveal the cases because the Trump administration would like Congress to impose new sanctions
on Iran.
U.S. officials on Wednesday night accused Iran of targeting American voters with faked but
menacing emails and warned that both Iran and Russia had obtained voter data that could be
used to endanger the upcoming election.
The disclosure by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe at a hastily called
news conference marked the first time this election cycle that a foreign adversary has been
accused of targeting specific voters in a bid to undermine democratic confidence -- just four
years after Russian online operations marred the 2016 presidential vote.
The claim that Iran was behind the email operation, which came into view on Tuesday as
Democrats in several states reported receiving emails demanding they vote for President
Trump, was leveled without specific evidence .
...
Metadata gathered from dozens of the emails pointed to the use of servers in Saudi Arabia,
Estonia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, according to numerous analysts.
The emails are under investigation, and one intelligence source said it was still unclear who
was behind them.
...
... the evidence remains inconclusive.
The claims that Iran is behind this are as stupid as the people who believe them.
I for one trust (not) those 50 former intelligence officials who say that all emails are
Russian disinformation. They are intended to 'sow discord' which is something the U.S. has
otherwise never ever had throughout its history.
More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their
belief that the recent disclosure of emails ... "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian
information operation."
...
While the letter's signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security
experience had made them "deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant
role in this case" and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin's hand
at work.
"If we are right," they added, "this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in
this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this."
No, this doesn't make any sense. It is not supposed to do that.
Posted by b on October 22, 2020 at 7:21 UTC | Permalink
The sustained tosh from the good old boys at state, cia, fbi & nsa isn't worthy of
comment, given that it is 100% evidence-free accusations which surprise surprise 'just
happens' to align with these provenly corrupt organisations' most prioritsed foreign policy
goals.
We know that these yarns align in syncopation with
what the amerikan empire most wants to promulgate, yet bereft of even a a cunt hair's worth
of evidence, the only truth which can be inferred from this foggy bottom tosh is the obvious
one - that is that the empire is becoming so desperate they will happily toss their
credibility with the many to the winds if they can, please sir, just convince a few of the
few.
Stuff like this is a suitable test of how the media are supposed to represent our interests
and help us in not getting fooled. You report, and afterwards you test what your readers
believe.
Independently of questionable bias issues serious newspapers will defend news like this
with formal justifications of journalistic code
- neutrality and objectivity: we just report but don't judge.
- null hypothesis of trustworthiness: official sources are to be trusted unless proven
otherwise. At least, proven otherwise by someone we consider trustworthy.
The propaganda is already embedded in the lofty ethics codes journalists will proudly adhere
to.
"Other documents that have emerged include FBI paper work that reveals the bureau's
interactions with the shop's owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, who reported the laptop's contents
to authorities. The document shows that Isaac received a subpoena to testify before the U.S.
District Court in Delaware on Dec. 9, 2019 . One page appears to show the serial
number for a MacBook Pro laptop and a hard drive that were seized by the agency."
https://www.ibtimes.sg/signed-receipt-hunter-bidens-name-delaware-laptop-repair-store-surfaces-52672
So the FBI kept Hunter Biden's bomb shell HDDs under wraps for almost a year. Enough time
to figure out they where not filled with Russian kompromat.
If you needed a leaked email to understand why it was corrupt for Hunter Biden to be getting
50k a month to be on the board of a Ukranian energy company, then you are likely already so
propagandized that you will vote for Joe Biden no matter what gets printed.
Really this propaganda is a brilliant move for those who control what is in print. They
have a clear circle of blame in Russia, Iran, or China, who are to blame for everything, and
this allows the media to limit the scope of discussion greatly by suppressing real criticisms
towards actual problems (the Bidens being corrupt across multiple generations) and deflecting
that energy into hating Russia, China, and Iran, which are the main targets for imperialism.
It is also a crude and vague lie to use anonymous sources to blame foreign entities for these
types of things, which actually makes it an elegant argument for a simpleton as it is
difficult if not impossible to disprove.
Because the media is really owned and operated by so few people who all have a hive-mind
about money and power, the messages are consistent, even though ridiculous, and they resonate
with many of the readers who really ought to know better, but have become inured to the
damaging effects of the lies they have consumed for decades. Stories like these will keep
working for a long time. If one of the sources in the article reported 'Up is Down, Left is
Right!', there would be a wave of car accidents until they issued a retraction.
The Russians ( Putin / Lavrov) say ever so politely that the US is not agreement-capable.
I add that the US ( politicians, Wall Streeters, MSM, think tanks ) are:
-- not truth-capable;
-- not ethics-capable;
-- not shame-capable;
-- not honour-capable.
What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul?
He turns into a ghoul without a soul, says I, a devil without human-ness!
How dare they call us deplorables when they are the despicables?
More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining
their belief that the recent disclosure of emails ... "has all the classic earmarks of a
Russian information operation."
Do American journalists actually believe it's still in Russia interest to re-elect Trump?
Washington-Kremlin relations have deteriorated rapidly under Trump.
Posted by: Et Tu | Oct 22 2020 9:35 utc | 9 -- "In America, Truth is a Foreign Agent and
World Peace is a threat to National Security."
Nice one... Meet Mr Truth, un-registered foreign agent !!! and Mr World Peace, national
security threat !!!
American leadership would not be so despicable IF they do not pretend to be "spreading
freedom / democracy" when they wreak their global malice.
They do not even care for their own people (covid19 fiasco, anyone?), but pretend to care
for the Chinese people so much they would regime-change the CCP; they pretend to care for the
Russian people so much they would sooner shoot Putin's plane from the sky; they pretend to
care for the Iranian people so much they block their access to covid19 medicines.
Here's a part of a comment I posted back in February 2020 that none of you took
seriously.
Posted by: Circe | Feb 28 2020 20:29 utc | 124:
The planet of extremely bad karma SATURN is moving into Bloomberg's sign, Aquarius, right
after mid-March and forming a square to Biden's sign, Scorpio. This is a very malefic
aspect.
People under these two signs, Aquarius and Scorpio ie Bloomberg and Biden will
experience obstacles, setbacks and challenges, create hidden enemies , and aging
will be accelerated and serious health issues could emerge.
So I was criticized for injecting astrology into that election thread, mostly by
AntiSpin.
Turns out as usual I hit the mark.
Bloomberg lost close to a BILLION dollars and failed badly in the primaries. That's what I
call a major setback. However, as of December after a 6-month retrograde into Capricorn,
Saturn is returning to Aquarius, so it ain't over for Bloomberg and things will get
complicated for Biden , for the U.S. and the rest of the world.
I also stated back then that nominating Joe Biden would be a greater risk for Dems than
nominating Bernie Sanders because Joe Biden was heading for serious astrological head winds
relating to something unseen at the time involving a serious family issue.
While I was certain that whatever the issue was would come to light and could affect him
in the Presidential campaign, I couldn't figure out the family aspect at the time, since he
appears to have a solid marriage and tragedy is in the rear view now.
Last night however it all suddenly became clear and I've come to the realization that I
was 100% right when I wrote that comment back in February 2020. Tonight I realized that the
family issue...is Hunter Biden!
I was sounding the alarm that something bad would come to light because Saturn was headed
into Aquarius, Biden's Home and Family sector squaring Biden's sign.
However, to make matters worse, it turns out that Hunter Biden is an Aquarian and Saturn
the karmic taskmaster is headed on a collision course to upend his life.
At the time I wrote the comment I obviously couldn't predict exactly what would unfold,
how or the precise timing, only that it would be bad and that's why I warned back then that
Democrats should have chosen Bernie. I believed Bernie could beat Trump and I was right,
because Trump is in total mental meltdown and self-destructing with his handling of the
pandemic.
Now even if Saturn will square Biden's Scorpio that's not to say that Biden won't still
win, but we are approaching a very bad full moon on October 31st. There is massive tension
building, subterfuge lurking and the situation is going to get ugly. A battle royal is
brewing. This is a powder keg moment.
Trump will not behave at the debate today. Must see t.v. With Obama's scorching speech
yesterday seething in Trump's brain, and his Iran stunt unravelling and ineffective at
distracting from the spotlight from Obama and the laptop bone clenched between his teeth;
he's a rabid dog fit to be tied. Give him a padded cell, already.
As for the U.S. and the world: The pandemic started with Saturn crossing Pluto's path in
Capricorn and entering full force into Aquarius in March when the world shut down.
So what will happen when karmic Saturn crosses Pluto again on it's way out of Capricorn
and enters Aquarius for the next 3 years?
Fasten your seat belts everyone...we're heading into major turbulence. There's so much
karmic tension gathering steam; it's very scary.
How much does it cost to get a trip to the moon?
I'll get back to sleazy Giuliani and his Pandora's box. There's too much to unpack there
than meets the eye. Just know that when circumstances appear too convenient-it's because they
are.
Trump's dirty play is a day late and a dollar short plus he's not playing with a full
deck. Must be one of those Covid long-term effects.
It's time...to get these scum-sucking, misery mongers out of the damn White House
already!
You know the US government is suffering from severe Alzheimer's disease when it claims that
Iran (of all nations) sent threatening emails to Democrat voters demanding that they vote for
a President who authorised the murder of a popular Iranian military general back in early
January this year.
Brian Kilmeade and morning crew run the fake Iranian emails story by former CIA station
Chief Daniel Hoffman.
Kabuki Actor Hoffman:
'[Uses opportunity to say Iranian Mantra] Iran has been attacking us for years, they have
attacked our shipping in the Gulf (???, that's a new one) blah-blah-blah.
'Iran and Russia are attacking our democracy because that is what they fear most about
America. Democracy would be the end of both regimes (Iran has no other motive to dislike the
U.S. such as us killing their top General, the Stuxnet virus, murderous sanctions, ...)'
So they hate us because of our freedoms, a classic.
Kabuki Actor Kilmeade:
'Can't we do something about this?' [note, the U.S. is the perpetual victim, never the
bully]
'Can't we pushback?' [The aggrieved victim, the U.S. is defending itself]
'Iran is doing this, Russia is sending bombers, can't we blow up an oil well?'
Kabuki Actor Kilmeade represents the entire degenerate U.S. public, unable to process
information that views another country as having rational motives or our Intel agencies of
being deceptive.
God, if you exist, You must hate this more than I do. How long?
All that rubbish is distraction. Discussing it is just playing to Borg's music.
They come up with so outlandish and jaw dropping crap that half he people thinks "it is so
outlandish it gotta be true, who would lie so much?" and other half that knows better is in
such a shock and disbelief that it needs some time to come to its senses and start tearing
apart the lie piece by piece BUT.... Time is lost, distraction worked and MSM/Borg come up
with next outrageous lie for next round. Russia, China, Navalny etc. etc.
And while marry go round Borg is doing it's deeds in dark while people is obsessing with
Trump's knickers.
Barack oblamblam held off until as long as he possibly could, a move most likely connected to
two realities, (1) not wanting to contradict what he, oblamblam said back in march "do not
underestimate Joe's ability to screw anything up" and (2) Oblamblam's desire not to be
found to be associated with sleepy joe's blatant corruption. Mud sticks n all that. Oblamblam
was much more subtle in lining up wedges to be trousered. eg. Try as people might they have
yet to uncover how a community worker turned prez found the dough to purchase a 45 acre
Martha's vineyard estate off a notorious billionaire and Oblambam is reluctant to do anything
which could prompt those questions,
Hence it wasn't until the 2020 election was mostly over that some DNC extortionists
managed to convince oblam to say a few words, or else, to the Philadelphia african american
males who chose to stay home on election day 2016.
Barack can claim 'he paid his dues' whilst keeping as much space as he can organise
between himself and crooked joe, who has already brought oblamblam's prezdency into disrepute
with the shameless & ugly ukraine rort that he and his bagman hunter had concocted.
There we mentioned the philly speech oh rabid, irrationally superstitious dembot.
Here's my prediction
Trump re-elected I fortell will mean more racist murdering thugs on the street. an guess what
they'l be In uniform and directly or indirectly trained by Israel.
And then there's the military presence on your streets -- you ain't seen nothing yet.
Wake the f up your gunna be massively oppressed by a fascist govenment ya skin couloir won't
matter, nore who you voted for. You already live in a one party dictatorship.
ie the elite. Face it your redundant as a human being replaced by a micro-chip.
Revolt I tell you revolt !!
The greater American public are about to become the next oppressed Palistinians ! oppressed
devalued and slowly distroyed. Like a frog in a heated pan.
You won't notice till it's to late will you ?
No really, will you ?
Journalism love's that high minded nonsense.
They write what they are paid to write.
Looking at the guardian wrt Assange
these clowns are beneath contempt.
Don't know if you are familiar with the box populi blog.
There a very good set of chapters from a book about journalist ethics.
i'm just surprised they haven't brought in venezuela and bolivia yet. that's supposed to be
sarcasm, but reality keeps outstripping sarcasm. i am actually worried they are ramping up
for a war in biden's first 100 days, either against iran or some serious provocation of
russia like provoking some incident in azerbaijan and blaming armenia. they're f/n batshit.
mark2 i think you're correct about more jackbooted government thugs on the street, but that's
gonna happen under either trump or crime bill joe/copmala. you're right about the israeli
training too, they trained cops in that kneeling on the throat technique. field tested on
palestinians.
Idiotic.
The united States was once a nest of excellence in nearly everything. Now it s a hub of naked
idiocy.
The Russians have nothing to fear from the US or Nato, except in the economy but they can fix
it. The Iranians have enough of what it takes to keep the Zio anglos away and at bay:
thousands of missiles to target Israel, Saudiland, a 25 year economic alliance program with
Beijing.
And clearly the time and opportunity where it was possible to still erase in a single coup
the Iranian military might is over.
"Breaking WaPo: The U.S. government has concluded that Iran is behind a series of threatening
emails arriving this week in the inboxes of Democratic voters, according to two U.S.
officials. https://washingtonpost.com/technology/202"
Posted by: librul | Oct 22 2020 12:52 utc | 22 When you hear, "Russians", just substitute in
your mind "witches", the weight of evidence is the same.
Absolutely correct. You win the thread.
Neither Iran nor Russia nor China give a rat's ass about the US election. There may be
literally thousands of private enterprise hackers who want to breach US election servers
precisely to get the Personal Identifying Information which is coin of the realm on the Dark
Web, but they couldn't care less about the election itself. It's physically impossible for
any country outside of the US to significantly influence the election in a country of 300
million people - and every country knows that. The only country that *doesn't* know that is
the US, which is why it spends scores and hundreds of millions of dollars - up to five
billion in Ukraine, allegedly - to influence foreign elections. That's the level of effort
needed to influence a foreign election more than the influence of the actual inhabitants of
that nation. But every time some private group in Russia launches an ad campaign for a couple
hundred thousand bucks tops, with zero effect on the US election, Putin gets blamed for some
plan to mastermind the overthrow of "democracy."
I rather liked Obama's speech If for no other reason than the tone was completely
different from the two candidates.
1. I'm tired of Trump's narcissism .
2. Can't stand Biden's fake 'I'm one of you'. He is corrupt, feels guilty about it, and
has to reassure us that he's Lunch Box Joe .
I've noticed this about Biden for a while, he conjures up these fake memories ...
'You know what I'm talking about because I've been on that park bench at noon when you only
have 20 minutes to eat your lunch because that whistle going to blow and you have to run
back to your Tuna canning station or lose your job and with that your health insurance,
car, and home.'
Okay this is not a literal quotation but it is a pattern and you know what I'm talking
about :-)
Pretzelatack @ 26
Yes to all you say their.
Re-reading my above comments they sound pretty harsh !
I am sorry, and do apologise !
It was part desperation and part morbid humour in the spirit of b's post.
Comparing Americans to a frog in pan may be a bit much !
I am in the U.K. we had a gen election one year ago !
I WAS THAT FROG IN A PAN.
Now I live in a pox ridden bankrupt banana republic run by a bunch of Israel bootlickers.
I don't go down well at party's.
And it's not superstition when the facts start to align with planetary motion.
How do you explain the Moon's effect on nature?
You think it's the only celestial body in the Solar System that influences life on Earth?
That cosmic order is inescapable. Astrology is thousands of years old dating back to the
Babylonians and has evolved through centuries of study and cannot, should not be dismissed as
mere superstition.
I'm not an expert at all, but I recognize order and higher authority when I see it and
believe me those planets are there for a reason and they rule everything. They're like
carrots and sticks (IMHO mostly sticks). Now who put them there and to what ultimate purpose
besides order and evolution is another matter.
I don't often bring it into a discussion, especially not to throw a discussion off topic,
except when I intuitively feel fate present in important events both personally and on a
universal scale.
This is a time of fated/karmic events, the pandemic being the most important (lesson) of
these.
I think a more appropriate title would be "Fascist Season" . . . Fascism has come of age here
in the land of the fee. The "intelligence agencies" create disinformation campaigns to
overthrow the elected President while the "justice department" et al withhold evidence and
fail to prosecute all the oligarchs and crooks who are busy censoring
information and preparing to rig and disrupt the
impending presidential election.
But technology and the "progressive" (pun intended) destruction of the US Constitution has
led the dumbed-down US masses (don't forget Canada and Australia lol) into a whole new world
of Orwellian lock-downs and wholesale economic destruction aimed at finishing off what was
left of the US middle class. Soon we will have our cash taken away and replaced with a
digital currency that can
always be taken away or tailored for limited use, subject to negative interest rates that it
cannot escape, etc. And all this is ushered in via
hyperinflation leading to a collapse of the bond and equities markets, and finally the
collapse of the US dollar (and all other Western fiat currencies).
The USA is so naive. They have been interfering in so many elections using money,
blackmail,CIA operations. There was no way for other countries with less means to do the same
to the USA. Now with social media they can, and they are absolutely right to take their
revenge for all the troubles they got into with the USA plotting to promote a pro-US
leader.
Now the battle is equal and the USA does not have the monopoly of interfering in other
countries election!
Tit for tat...
All these stories are risible. Note the struggle to clarify who these 'malign'
Régimes are attacking the US, and why.
Russia-R-R for Trump, but Iran-Ir-Ir for Trump doesn't quite hit the spot so now Iran is
trying to damage Pres. Trump (from one of the articles..) .. is Iran trying to promote the
election of Kamala Harris? What? Russia is for Trump and Iran against ?
The fall-back is a blanket, these evil leaders are trying to 'undermine democracy',
influence 'US voters', meddle in 'our freedom-loving' politics, etc.
The attempt to stir up the spectre of threatening enemies far off is a hackneyed ploy. In
the case of the USA, it is now melded with the promotion and control of planned internal
strife, with internal enemies being natives (not islamist terrorists who sneak in and are
under cover before erupting in murderous madness..) - Color Revolution Style.
-- BLM + Antifa haven't been active recently (or not in MSM top stories) as the election
is approaching. Such would be upping the Trump vote for "law-and-order."
(imho from far off..) Many in the US don't take any of this seriously, it is just
game-playing, false alarm, pretend concern.
"Oh wow, Iran is targetting Trump, did you know, real serious, did you hear, tell me is
Zoe-chick divorcing that creep Edmond, I want to know, did you have that interview with Gov.
X for the job? Is she hot? How much "
The credentialised class and the movers and shakers just roll their eyeballs, and the poor
are in any case stuck in a desperado cycle of struggle against misery, what is going on with
Putin / Iran / Xi is off the radar.
Vilification of China (hate hate hate); claimed by the media and the pundits and our
"Fearless Covid Conquering Leader" and all the good little parrots, to be the source of evil
itself... Scapegoat extraordinaire... Hacking and Cheating and Aggressing and exercising
Brutality towards its own citizens... The worst of the worst per our "intelligence" apparatus
(and blind ideologues). Existential threat numero uno.
But wait!
The US is being attacked! Attacked they say; by all of the "bad" guys simultaneously.
The forces of evil out there are broad and out to get us. They hate our (imagined)
freedoms.
Evidence (not):
Justice Department pushing Iran-connected charges in HBO hack, other cases
U.S. government concludes Iran was behind threatening emails sent to Democrats
U.S. intelligence agencies say Iran, Russia have tried to interfere in 2020 election
Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say
Invariably in all cases, The Voice of "Intelligence" (not bloody likely from ANY of this
crew) deeply intoned to impart the "certainty", neatly encapsulated in the words "highly
likely", delivered without a scrap of proof but loud, prominent, regular, mind numbing
pontification.
Trust me! We lie, We cheat, We steal; and that is just the tip of the iceberg.
The US, all on its own, engenders distrust within the population because the US and all
its political and Executive, and Legislative and Judicial and "intelligence" bureaucracies
are corrupt to the core... Worse, they make no bones about it if you pay attention. And
Partisanship is nothing but distraction because they are ALL corrupt and morally bankrupt;
without empathy, remorse, sense of guilt or shame.
It was the US itself that thought it could subjugate the world through its faux
"democratic" business practices and its claim of natural superiority... Its self declared
Rules of Order instead of adhering to and supporting consensus established International
LAW... Hegemon pompously declaring it has a RIGHT to Full Spectrum Dominance and slavish
obedience.
Not the Iranians, not the Russians, not the Chinese, not the CCP, not the North Koreans,
not the Venezuelans; none of them are disrupting, threatening or meddling in the US
elections.
If you believe what the morons are smearing across the public consciousness through every
communication medium possible you are a sucker... Totally disconnected any critical thinking
faculties that may have been present. The very definition of sheeple... baaaa! (the sound
drowns out reason and thought).
The rest of the World beyond NATO and Five Eyes isn't attacking the US or its
institutions. They have all been attacked every which way from Sunday BY the US and its
Satraps (targets of, victims of, and willing accomplices to our sophisticated excessively
funded and supported global protection racquet).
The US, our Government, always blames our designated and non-compliant, non-obeisant
existential threats for all the things we do to them.
And all this cacophony of alleged evil "attacks" from outside right now?
Look!!! Look!!! Over here!
Don't pay any attention to who and what decided to put us in the position we find
ourselves in and what we have done to vast swaths of the world's populations "over
there".
Now go vote for one of two degenerate teams, both of which are headed by supremely
unqualified psychopaths.
The CIA really needs a new playbook. The Russia/Iran thing is laughable to the rest of the
world, and to many 'Americans' as well. Unfortunately Partisans run the country, and those
folks are addicted to the Kool Aid of MAGA – just different versions.
This October is like an Advent Calendar of October Surprises with plenty of time still on
the clock for some great Golden Shower or Democratic child orgy deep fakes. Who the hell
knows at this point – the acceleration of events this year makes Future Shock look like
an Ambien commercial.
Trump is toast and good riddance. And sure Biden et al are war criminals and corrupt
creatures of the Swamp. The Establishment is a much easier target to resist vis a vis policy
than a crazy cretin without any policy but his own self-aggrandizement.
"Astrology believers tend to selectively remember predictions that turn out to be true,
and do not remember those that turn out false. Astrology has not demonstrated its
effectiveness in controlled studies and has no scientific validity.[6]:85;[11] The study,
published in Nature in 1985, found that predictions based on natal astrology were no better
than chance, and that the testing "...clearly refutes the astrological hypothesis."[10] "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrology
As for getting voter US state voter databases, most states allow people to purchase part of a
voter's information. Other parts like birth dates remain private. But the publicly available
list is probably enough as it identifies party affiliation, voting history as when dates they
voted (not how they voted). All the other private information is more useful to identity
thieves and Indian scam centers. And as one poster noted, those databases like gold on dark
web.
As for email addresses that implies those must be acquired through party officials and
candidates off donor lists. Off hand I do not know that an email address is required to
register to vote--I seriously doubt it. I know that Bernie famously refused to give his donor
database to Hillary. The emails imply some sort of inside job or some false flag.
Just read the story on Truthout of voters in Alaska & Florida, and possibly Pennsylvania
and Arizona receiving threatening messages if they should vote against Trump. "We know you're
a Democrat and we have access to your voting records..." Metadata indicates servers located
in the kingdoms of Israel's new friends...
Well, I just went to the Board of Elections website for my county here in Ohio and I can,
with a few clicks, generate a report from their site of a county listing of voters filtered
in over a half-dozen ways - i.e. by Party affiliation and including addresses. Comes under
the heading of "Voter and Candidate Tools."
So some concoct a tale which blames Iran, Russia, etc. for information freely available
from your State's BOE? This information has always been available, but not exploited before
in this way by US neo Nazis.
So, even though your ballot is secret, intimidation is easy to engage in based solely on
Party affiliation of record. If Trump loses, should some people expect bricks through their
windows, or perhaps fire-bombings? Trump and his supporters are certainly ratcheting up the
apocalyptic messaging, working themselves into a frenzy - that is obvious and not even
debatable.
I never read Dante; which circle of hell are we entering now?
Everyone here knows I was 100% behind Bernie Sanders for the Presidency because I felt he was
the right person for these times, but the mass is dumb and blind. I agree with the comment I
read on the previous thread I think by someone called Horseman that portrays Bernie's goal as
moving the Dem Party to the Left and not sheepdogging, but recognizing the stakes involved
superceded Left purity.
At the same time I was totally against Biden because he is much more Zionist than Bernie,
therefore more corrupt, as Zionism is counter-evolutionary being inherently supremacist,
entitled, and undemocratic.
However, Trump is exponentially worse! He is a fascist Zionist and totally depraved. There
is a choice here of monumental significance. Short term loss for greater future gain.
Biden is very flawed, but I'm inclined to view a man who suffered multiple life-altering
tragedies to reach this point and who is grappling with embracing a son, Hunter, who probably
was destroying his life, than a narcissistic less than evolved baby-man pig with a god
complex who squandered life and daddy's money on material and artificial pursuit and has no
notion of humanity, as the only sane choice.
Yes, Joe Biden should face his flaws and answer for whatever corruption exists in him, but
that laptop issue should not be a reason to stop people from getting Trump, the most corrupt
President in my lifetime next to Bush OUT. That goal is paramount. This is 2nd to the
pandemic in fated events. If people do not make the right choices and learn something from
these events then let this planet devolve into hell because that will be what is deserved!
The stakes right now are astronomical and super-fated!
Don't blow a singular opportunity to get rid of that Fascist pig Trump over a laptop
that's really a Pandora's box being used by Shmeagol Gollum Giuliani as a trap to unleash
misery for years to come.
This is clearly the Deep State and imperial establishment spouting obvious nonsense in order
to discredit themselves and therefore to help in Trump's reelection bid! Henry Kissinger told
me so! What incredibly subtle and intricate plans they have!
Or... maybe it is just a bunch of incompetent baboons in the Deep State control room
randomly flipping switches and pulling levers in the desperate hopes that something,
anything, works.
Nah! This is all part of the Great Plan! It just seems like abject stupidity because we
cannot grasp its intricate complexities.
All these new threads are defaulting to election threads. Sorry, b.
But I'll bite.
In the case of a Biden victory, which do you think will happen first?:
1) Renewed hostilities w/ Assad in Syria leading to his violent ousting and thrusting the
west into violent confrontation w/ Russia...
Or...
2) Forcible entry into the Armenian/Azerbaijan conflict and establishing a no-fly
zone...
Or...
3) a combination of both and would throw us into a direct confrontation with either Russia
or Iran or both?
It looks like the demonizing of Iran is ramping up with the mail-threats telling dims to
vote Trump or else. Dims don't like hostile, foreign powers helping the Don and swaying
elections. It's a nice tip-off as to what Biden and the dim establishment might consent to
once Obama-era sycophants and technocrats move back in to the White House.
Seems to be the year of anniversaries; another's being celebrated today but not by the Outlaw
US Empire. China
& North Korea Celebrate 70th Anniversary of China's intervention in Outlaw US Empire's
invasion of Korea , which is how it's being portrayed, "China, N. Korea stand together
'for self-protection against US hegemony' like 70 years ago" reads the headline at the link.
To mark the anniversary, China has published an official
history , explaining its decision "To resist US aggression and aid Korea, China had no
choice but to fight a war;" the 3-volume work is The War to Resist US Aggression and Aid
Korea . From China's perspective, it defeated Outlaw US Empire forces; so, it's not
"forgotten" at all. Xi's using the occasion to give a major speech, the subject of which
hasn't been disclosed.
Just 12 days to go until the refusals to abide by the outcome day arrives. If one wants to
look, there's lots of illegal foreign influence happening but from sources that go
unmentioned: Corporations that have foreign owners, which most do, who provided campaign
contributions in any form to any entity associated with the election.
HeHeHe!!! The first bits of Putin's appearance at the Valdai Club today
are being published . In a jab back at those accusing Russia of interfering in elections
and such Putin said:
"Strengthening our country and looking at what is happening in the world, in other
countries, I want to say to those who are still waiting for the gradual demise of Russia: in
this case, we are only worried about one thing -- how not to catch a cold at your
funeral."
There's more, although a transcript has yet to be published.
There's a thread right before this one on International Events. Why don't you go spew your
poisonous Trump Kool-Aid there instead of polluting with Trumpian-laced propaganda here?
I know-I know, Election threads raise the common sense factor further and that leads to
Trump's demise, so you can't help but rush in to correct that dangerous shift. Why
don't you do something equally meaningless like pounding sand down a rat hole?
After the Russiagate fiasco I thought the Americans had learned their lesson, but it seems I
was wrong.
Honestly, this may be the beginning of an irreversible process of ideological polarization
of the American Empire.
The thing is it's one thing to wage propaganda warfare against a foreign enemy to your
domestic audience: the foreign enemy will be destroyed either way, so they will never be able
to tell their version of the story, plus the domestic audience can give itself the luxury of
living the lie indefinitely as it doesn't affect their daily lives. Plus they'll directly
benefit from the conquest of a foreign enemy, e.g. cheaper gas to your car after the
destruction and conquest of Iraq; the abundance in the shelves of Walmarts after the
subjugation of China, and so on.
It's a completely different story when you wage propaganda warfare against yourself: the
Trump voter knows he/she didn't vote for Trump because of Russian influence, while the Hilary
Clinton/Joe Biden voter knows he/she didn't vote in either of them because of Chinese
influence. But each part will believe the half of the lie that benefits them against the
other, creating a vicious cycle of mistrust between the two halves.
Meanwhile, the American economy (capitalism) continues to decline. Time is running up:
It was a shock-and-awe moment when lawmakers gave the package a thumbs up. Yet in the
months since, the planned punch has not materialized.
The Treasury has allocated $195 billion to back Fed lending programs, less than half of
the allotted sum. The programs supported by that insurance have made just $20 billion in
loans, far less than the suggested trillions.
The programs have partly fallen victim to their own success: Markets calmed as the Fed
vowed to intervene, making the facilities less necessary as credit began to flow again.
So, the very announcement of the Fed it would lend indefinitely and unconditionally made
such loans unnecessary!
I didn't like it at the beginning, but the term "Late Capitalism" is growing on me.
MSM pushing the the Iran angle shows that they are more anti-Iran than anti-Trump.
What effect would Iran intend by sending fake threatening emails from right-wing guns nuts
to Democrats? I doubt it would discourage those Democrats from voting (for Biden), and I
doubt Iran would think it would. The only effect it would have is to increase the fear,
distrust, and disgust Democrats already have for those groups - which is "sowing discord",
not "meddling with elections".
The Trump regime pushes this because it makes Trump look good & makes Iran look bad
(at least the way it's been framed). MSM generally doesn't like Trump, but prints this
because hyping fear & loathing toward Iran matters more to them than dumping Trump.
Great that they are working on it, I was taking notes but kind of lousy its not easy to
listen and write at the same time. Started kind of nervous, but right now it is Putin at his
most relaxed and eloquent.
It is interesting to see how Putin is way more at ease when answering journalist's
questions than when exposing his part of the event. Right now they asked him about his image,
punk, criminal etc etc. Answer: my function is the main thing, and I do not take it
personally, now the chinese will ask.
In case the truth gets lost in your purposely misleading translation. This hare-brained
scheme was cooked up by Trump and his newly-appointed right-hand bootlicker RATcliffe, at DNI
and delivered to the American people by the latter as a desperate distraction minutes after
Obama smacked down Trump on every air wave.
It immediately gave off an offensive odor, as I stated previously, of Trump turd floating
in golden toilet.
And that's why Chris Wray looked so awkward and uneasy behind that RAT.
Three hours of serious talking about any and all world problems. I wonder how long Lunch Box
Joe could hold on his own. The orange man probably could do it, but just talking about
himself. The US need someone like VVP.
I ought to listen while also reading the Russian close-captioning so I can rebuild my
Russian language facility and catch the body language messages, but I still need to read/hear
it all in English. As for his response to questions, IMO Putin knows what to expect from
media reporters but not from other experts in the audience whose questions are usually more
complex. Then there's the need to remain tactful, although there are times when he does need
to get indignant, as with the issue of illegal sanctions that harm nations's abilities to
deal with the pandemic--the utter immorality and inhumanity of the Outlaw US Empire that
never gets the attention it deserves.
What would Iran gain by scaring lower end of the spectrum Democrats into voting for Trump,
is that desirable for Iran?
Ah ... but it was a pump fake, Iran thought that people would think that the emails were
genuine, arrest a few of the Proud Boys and this would hurt Trump by associating him with a
domestic terror group. Not only is this scenario convoluted but it is extremely risky because
it might scare a handful of impressionable Democrats into voting for Trump and any
investigation would uncover hacking of some kind.
Most likely suspect, Israel. They have the means to hack and the contacts in the U.S. to
suggest Iranian origin.
As Putin said, Russia was able to find "balance" in its reaction to COVID; and as with China
but unlike the Outlaw US Empire, it put the safety of the Russian people first and foremost.
The Empire is experiencing yet another big outbreak nationwide and has yet to put the
interests of its citizenry first.
Is Circe deranged?
I don't know but I doubt if she spends trillions of dollars each year on murdering inocent
men women and children.
Mmmmm
Perhaps to people living in a ''loony bin'' (America) people outside must seem quite strange
!
I live near Glastonbury finest bunch of people you'd ever meet. Not known for genocidel
tendency's.
Any ways Iran, Russia interfering in America's elections -- -- - pure paranoid delusion
(weaponised)
The Mighty Wurlitzer has
begun to sound more like the New York Philharmonic tuning up while riding the Empire State Express
as it crashes endlessly into Grand Central Station.
Dear Circe, each language is a world view, I wish I had the resources available today when
I was younger, I would speak as many as possible, I consider that with the means available
today speaking half a dozen would be no problem at all. You have the blessing and the curse
of speaking english, so no need for anything else, but that is your problem, you are so
relaxed about it that you're not able to spell correctly the name of one of your best known
cities, San Francisco, with a c before the s.
Again, come up with something else, the bot label is as primitive as your knowledge of your
own language and geography.
kiwiklown@14: They do not even care for their own people (covid19 fiasco, anyone?), but pretend to care
for the Chinese people so much they would regime-change the CCP; they pretend to care for the
Russian people so much they would sooner shoot Putin's plane from the sky; they pretend to
care for the Iranian people so much they block their access to covid19 medicines.
Well said, although rather sad! The last pretension reveals exactly the mentality that was
behind the genocide upon the Native American centuries ago, resorting to tactics such as
passing out smallpox infected blankets, dispensation of whisky, as well as outright
slaughters of course.
Gruffy @ 68
Maybe but she martches to a different drum beat. Not the trump drum beat of war that you
follow, and will lead you all over the cliff.
Don't get me wrong ! You'd have to squeeze my nuts pretty dam hard (tears in my eyes) before
I'd vote for Biden.
But you must know two things -- -
A. Trump is bat shit crazy and has his finger on the button whilst the Dems are money mad and
there is know profit in Armageddon.
And
B. I'm antifa my hobby is smashing the filthy fascists !!
Who's streets ? Our streets !!
Without mentioning its name, Putin in his speech pinned the tail on
the donkey regarding TrumpCo's pandemic failure:
"The values of mutual assistance, service and self-sacrifice proved to be most important.
This also applies to the responsibility, composure and honesty of the authorities, their
readiness to meet the demand of society and at the same time provide a clear-cut and
well-substantiated explanation of the logic and consistency of the adopted measures so as not
to allow fear to subdue and divide society but, on the contrary, to imbue it with confidence
that together we will overcome all trials no matter how difficult they may be.
"The struggle against the coronavirus threat has shown that only a viable state can act
effectively in a crisis ..." [My Emphasis]
Yes, it didn't begin with Trump, but he sure did accelerate the process of making the
domestic part of the Outlaw US Empire dysfunctional, which for me makes this "silly season"
even worse than usual.
I view this as shit-against-the-wall policy. You throw it up there. Sometimes it sticks,
sometimes it doesn't.
This is how lowly vermin do foreign policy nowadays.
Remember the story -- first reported as Russians, then Iranians -- paying bounty to the
Talibs to kill (as if they needed motivation) American soldiers?
Well, in that case, I guess neither story really stuck, but you see where I'm going with
this. It's all shite
And silly season continues with self-proclaimed anti-fascists who don't know what fascists
are.
Fascism doesn't necessarily have anything to do with race or religion. Is there any racial
difference between Ukropians and Russians? Fascism is simply a tool that capitalists use to
smash class consciousness. Literally any differences can be used by the capitalists to direct
the violent mobs at their victims, even differences that are completely imaginary and don't
really exist except in the group mind of the mob.
Now I wonder... who is it that will attack someone for saying "But ALL lives
matter!" ? Who is smashing class consciousness?
And this is why the USA is turning into a failed state and Russia isn't:
"Nevertheless, I am confident that what makes a state strong, primarily, is the
confidence its citizens have in it . That is the strength of a state. People are the
source of power , we all know that. And this recipe doesn't just involve going to the
polling station and voting, it implies people's willingness to delegate broad authority to
their elected government, to see the state, its bodies, civil servants, as their
representatives – those who are entrusted to make decisions, but who also bear full
responsibility for the performance of their duties .
"This kind of state can be set up any way you like. When I say 'any way,' I mean that what
you call your political system is immaterial. Each country has its own political culture,
traditions, and its own vision of their development. Trying to blindly imitate someone else's
agenda is pointless and harmful. The main thing is for the state and society to be in
harmony .
"And of course, confidence is the most solid foundation for the creative work of the
state and society. Only together will they be able to find an optimal balance of freedom and
security guarantees ." [My Emphasis]
What a brilliant collection of words emphasizing the absolute requirement for the state to
do its utmost to support and develop its human capital--its citizens--while also saying
citizens have their own duty to ensure the quality of the state, which means installing
representatives that will work for them and promote their interests first and foremost since
they are the backbone of the state. Don't feed and care for the citizenry as in the USA and
you'll have a corrupt, feeble state when it comes to keeping itself strong. And IMO the
primary difference that's making Russia stronger while the USA atrophies is that Russia
listens to its people and genuinely cares for and acts in their interests while in the USA
the demands of the citizenry have fallen on deaf ears for decades, regardless the political
party running the government.
Gruffy is trying to conflate perpetrator as opposed to the victim/ victems !
Classic -- -
US geo-politics.
Blame shifting fascist tactic.
Learned far right tactic.
Or
Psychopathic projection.
Example -- --
US attacks Iran &Russia but blames them for attacking The US.
Also Gruffy I note how you side step a point well made by
Asking a deliberately distracting question. Yawn
"Blame shifting" absolutely is part of smashing class consciousness. Shift the blame
for people's difficulties from capitalism to various parts of the working class. Those who
participate violently in this process are fascists and perpetrators. Of course, they are also
victims because they are destroying their own class consciousness. Class consciousness is
necessary if they are ever to be able to address the real issues causing them hardship.
When the question and answers segment comes online it is worth reading his opinion about
the Karabakh conflict and how it is a very difficult situation for Russia since both
countries involved, Armenia and Azerbaijan are part of a common family. The question implied
that Russia would unequivocally side with Armenia based on religion, to which Putin answered
that 15% of Russia population professes the islamic faith and that he considers Azerbaijan a
country as close to Russia as Armenia, with over two million nationals from each of the
warring countries living in Russia and as part of a very influential and productive
community.
Interesting too his take on Turkey, admitting that there are a lot of disagreements Putin
had good words for Erdogan admitting that he is independent and that he is someone able to
uphold his word, the Turk Stream project, it was agreed upon and completed, compared to the
europeans to whom he did not spare in his almost contemptuous words insinuating their lack of
sovereignty.
Gruffy error !!
In this context the 'mob'
Is trump followers.
The thugs in uniform.
The proud boys.
The US forces abroad and at home.
Gruffy 'you' ARE the mob.
I feel you watched to many cowboy films portraying native Americans as the bad guys! It
shows.
I won't be replying more. as I see your very shabby diversionary tactic. Nice try though. We
see you !! What you are and what you do.
Thanks for your reply! Even before the Q&A Putin skewers both the Empire and EU in
this paragraph:
"Genuine democracy and civil society cannot be imported.' I have said so many times. They
cannot be a product of the activities of foreign 'well-wishers,' even if they 'want the best
for us.' In theory, this is probably possible. But, frankly, I have not yet seen such a thing
and do not believe much in it. We see how such imported democracy models function. They are
nothing more than a shell or a front with nothing behind them, even a semblance of
sovereignty. People in the countries where such schemes have been implemented were never
asked for their opinion, and their respective leaders are mere vassals. As is known, the
overlord decides everything for the vassal . To reiterate, only the citizens of a
particular country can determine their public interest." [My Emphasis]
And that "particular country" is one where both the citizens and the government share
"confidence" in each other such that they work in "harmony." Thus the #1 goal of the Outlaw
US Empire to sow chaos within nations so such confidence and harmony can't be established;
and if they are, then destroyed.
No one has ever lied to American people more than the American regime and her terrorizing
intelligence community organization, Snowden is the living proof of this . Anyone still alive
and living on this planet if it ever believed a word on anything coming out of the USG not
only is a fool and a total idiot but his/her head must be seriously checked. Regardless of
their party affiliations they have no shame of lying cheating steeling those United
oligarchy' Secretary of State is the proof that.
This poster is on neither "side" . More like Putin looking in pain over Azerbaijan and
Armenia killing each other at the prompting of some third party that doesn't care about
either of them. This poster is neither faux left nor right wing; however, this poster's
grandmother was Cherokee. There is no anger directed your way for your failure to understand,
though.
If Americans had any backbone they would be on the streets protesting about this sham
election prior to the election, of false choice no choice.
You earn your democracy or you loose your democracy.
Iran, Russia bashing ! Just how low have you people sunk.
No hind sight, no insight and no foresight !
No hope. Spineless.
Totally weird! You all, please get behind re-electing Trump. He is doing such a good job of
destroying the US empire and its pretensions. If you are really a leftist, this is a GOO:-D
thing!
The alternative is to vote Independent or Green but they don't have a chance right
now.
Walking only 3 miles on Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles , going west I have counted 47 homeless
(male,females,wht,black,Asian)asking for handouts. These lost soles are the ones who have
paid the price for the for ever wars to secure the Israel' realm,
The propose of yesterday's security show at FBI was to convince the public that all negative
comments and cretics coming their way by internet blogs, email , media etc. is not really
from disfranchised Americans public, but rather foreign countries operation that they do not
like our democracy and way of life, It was solely meant to make people not to subscribe and
believe what negativity they hear or read on US( non existing)democracy ,
This is a cheap standard operation by totalitarian regimes.
53
That money went to the ESF,what else do you think is levitating stocks and bonds ?
You assumed wrongly, but Kudlow let slip they(ESF) were broke and actually stated the money
was going to them in a presser.
I dunno why I'm bothering to do this because astrology is such a lame easily disproven
superstition that gets by because there are just so many con artists making predictions that
occasionally some must be correct - the stopped clock effect, but here goes.
The moon's effect on our planet's oceans is proven to be caused by a known phenomenon,
gravity. These stars whose positions we are told influence our human lives (just another
anthrocentric load of bulldust what about beings on other planets?) are thousands of light
years away from earth, meaning when the con-artists draw up their star charts or WTF they
call 'em, they are looking at formations that happened thousands of years ago - all different
depending on a particular star's distance from earth.
Claiming to be able to predict anything rational from such a mish mash of incorrect data is
risible, sad really and goes much to explain the house dembot's mania.
As for oblammer in Miami? I guess the dnc know where quite a few oblammer bodies are
buried.
My view is changing, Biden is so crooked that even though if he wins, the corporate media
will try hard to leave him alone, but he's just too clumsy, so that some dems are going to
side with the rethugs to impeach him and fast, however that may be what the oligarchy is
counting on, as that brings bad karmala harris to the fore, a women so unpopular with dem
rank and file she withdrew from the primary before any votes were cast, how's that for
'democracy'.
This is the real issue, both dem & rethug prez candidates are crooks through and
through, if the dems win, then the spotlight the corporate media shone on orangeutan will be
turned off. At least some of trump's worst rorts were stopped by a fear of being found out,
but if the dems win dopey joe will have no such constraint - until he does something so over
the top eg kick off nuclear war, that the media finally wakes up. too late but at least now
they're awake.
Posted by: vinnieoh | Oct 22 2020 16:04 utc | 45 If Trump loses, should some people expect
bricks through their windows, or perhaps fire-bombings?
That is the threat. If either side loses, there will be massive civil unrest - at least
it's very likely that is (part of) "the plan" - whatever the plan actually is. In any event,
plan or not, it's predictable. Most of the preppers I follow on Youtube are urging everyone
to stock up on food and water because there's a good chance that everyone will be back on
movement restrictions of some sort, if not full-on martial law, within the next couple
months. As I said before, this country is going to start looking like Turkey or Italy in the
70's when the Grey Wolves and the Red Brigades were terrorizing those countries. It may not
be "civil war", but it's likely to be uglier than what happened this summer.
There will be cries of joy in the streets and maybe some celebratory looting, all from the
urban left.
Trump's supporters might assemble peacefully in a very sparse manner, but I would bet most
would simply take the newly alotted time from the Biden-victory to prep and ready a little
more before the real fireworks begin. Violence would only erupt from the urban left attacking
those demonstrations.
Real men are lying in wait. The city is not their playground any longer.
Posted by: Debsisdead | Oct 22 2020 11:21 utc | 19 -- "Barack can claim 'he paid his dues'
whilst keeping as much space as he can organise between himself and crooked joe, who has
already brought oblamblam's prezdency into disrepute with the shameless & ugly ukraine
rort that he and his bagman hunter had concocted."
Thanks for your astute observations. Am learning much.
A compromised man never escapes blackmail: he is but a tool in the hands of his owners. It
is not IF, but WHEN he will be used / abused. Over and over again, like a banker's boot
stomping on his arrogant face.
But then, who is to say that Obanger Obummer was unaware of his VP, that Basement-Biding
Bidet Biden's 'arrangements' for wealth accretion? And more (there is always more), who is to
say that Obanging Ohumming gets NO share therefrom at some 'convenient' time?
Evil thinks himself clever to hide in the dark, yet lives in daily fear of the light.
Thusly Obanging Ohummer's calculations that you noted above, and his dark demeanour these
days. He knows he is walking on a knife edge, with a sword hanging over his head, and a
safety net (those 17 intelligence agencies?) that can turn into a fowler's snare (sorry,
mixed metaphors!)
Yet, looking at the happier demeanour (she used to scowl all through 2017/2018) on that
shallow face called Michelle Ohummer, we can guess that she thinks they have escaped clean
with their 'rewards of office'.
Christian J. Chuba @17 asked, "How long?" I ask, how does an immoral leadership ever going
to turn moral? When does America get the leadership that she deserves?
@71 karlof1 - "only a viable state can act effectively in a crisis" - Putin
What a brilliant equation from Putin. Even more penetrating and useful than the formerly
existing observation that socialist-style societies have performed best in response to the
virus. Putin's criterion cuts exactly to the essence of the thing.
What the US has demonstrated from the virus response is that it is not a viable state. The
benchmark now exists. Thanks for bringing it over.
I have a friend of Cherokee ancestry. She told me how once she was speaking with an elder
woman of the tribe, and described herself as "one-eighth Cherokee".
The old woman shook her head and said, "The Cherokee spirit cannot be diluted."
Should any here be interested, Wikipedia has aa extensive listing of governmental scandals
for the 20th and 21st century administrations. Note the number of executive, legislative and
judicial scandals for each administration. Note also the volume of scandals as
administrations go from Franklin D. Roosevelt through to D.J. Trump for both executive and
legislative branches. The political parties of the malfeasant are of interest as well -
trending can be discerned, maybe, for the observant.
I'd have more hope for Russia if the Russian ruling class weren't so obsessed with the
West and didn't send their children to Western (woke) schools, etc.
theallseeinggod , 7 hours ago
They're not doing that well, but they're not repeating many of the west's mistakes.
Normal , 5 hours ago
Now the West has rules only for poor people.
Helg Saracen , 6 hours ago
Advice to Americans (for the sake of experiment): prohibit lobbying in US and the right of
citizens with dual citizenship to hold public office in US. I assure - you will be surprised
how quickly Russians go from non-kosher to kosher for Americans and how American politicians,
the media will convince Americans of this at every intersection. :) Ha ha ha
Nayel , 5 hours ago
If the [Vichy] Left in America weren't so determined to project their own Bolshevik
leanings on to a possible great ally that their ideology now fears, Russia would be just
that: a great ally that could help America shake the Bolsheviks that have infiltrated the
American government and plan the same program their Soviet forefathers once held over
Russia...
Arising 2.0 , 1 hour ago
Western zionist controlled propaganda reminds me of Mohamed Ali- he used to talk up the
******** so much before a fight that when the time came to fight the opponent was usually
traumatised or confused. Until Ali met with Joe Frazier (Russia) who didn't fall for all the
pre-fight BS.
ThePinkHole , 39 minutes ago
Time for a pop quiz! Name the two countries below:
Country A - competency, attention to first principles, planning based on reality,
consistency of purpose, and unity of execution.
Country B - incompetency, interfering in everything everywhere, planning based on hubris
and sloppy assumptions, confusion, and disunity.
(Source: Adapted from Patrick Armstrong)
foxenburg , 3 hours ago
This one is always good for a laugh....the Daily Telegraph's Con Coughlin explaining in
2015 how Putin will fail in Syria...
We have all this talk of the 'Ruskies' when in fact it is not the ordinary Russian people
but rather a geopolitical power struggle. The ordinary US citizen or European just wants to
maintain their liberty and be able to profit from their endeavours. The rich and powerful
globalists who hide behind their military are the ones that play these games. I am no friend
of Putin but equally I am no friend of our own political establishment that have been
captured by Wall Street. I care about Main Street and as the US dollar loses its privilege
there will be real pain to share amongst our economies. The last thing we need is for the
elites of the Western alliance to profit with cold/hot wars on the backs of ourselves.
Having been behind the iron curtain as a young Merchant Navy Officer I found ordinary
citizens fine and even organized football matches with the local communist parties. People
have the same desires and aspirations and whether rich or poor we should respect each others
cultures and territories. http://www.money-liberty.com/gallery/Predictions-2021.pdf
..they have always been the reason for the industrial-military complex....but now, who
needs them.....we got china to point the finger at. so having 2 useful idiot countries...will
keep the weapons boys going for quite some time....
Snaffew , 7 hours ago
...he boogeyman has never been Russia, it resides right here in the US under the guise of
government, military, mainstream media, propaganda and sanctions, sanctions, sanctions
against anyone that rightfully takes our slice of entitled pie because they built a far
better and far cheaper mousetrap.
Oh the horrors of claiming to be a democracy and a capitalist nation when you just can't
seem to play by the rules. **** America---we have let the elites take us down the road to
ruins. We are as much at fault as they are for believing their nonsensical bs the whole while
all the evidence was smoking right in front of our face. Who's more stupid...them or us? I'd
tell everyone to take a good long look in the mirror if you are looking for an answer to that
question---
The Russians ( Putin / Lavrov) say ever so politely that the US is not
agreement-capable.
I add that the US ( politicians, Wall Streeters, MSM, think tanks ) are:
not truth-capable;
not ethics-capable;
not shame-capable;
not honour-capable.
What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul? He turns into a
ghoul without a soul, says I, a devil without human-ness! How dare they call us deplorables
when they are the despicables?
Tramp was essentially the President from military industrial complex and Israel lobby. So he was not played. That's naive. He
followed the instructions.
On March 20, 2018, President
Donald Trump
sat beside Saudi crown prince Muhammed bin Salman at the White House and lifted a giant map that said
Saudi weapons purchases would support jobs in "key" states -- including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida and Ohio, all
of which were crucial to Trump's
2016 election victory
.
"Saudi Arabia has been a very great friend and a big purchaser of
equipment but if you look, in terms of dollars, $3 billion, $533 million, $525 million -- that's peanuts for you. You
should have increased it," Trump
said
to the prince, who was (and still is) overseeing a military campaign in Yemen that has deployed U.S. weaponry to commit
scores
of alleged war crimes.
Trump has used his job as commander-in-chief to be America's arms-dealer-in-chief
in a way no other president has since Dwight Eisenhower, as he prepared to leave the presidency, warned in early 1961
of the military-industrial complex's political influence. Trump's posture makes sense personally ― this is a man who
regularly
fantasizes
about violence, usually toward foreigners ― and he and his advisers see it as politically useful, too. The president
has repeatedly appeared at weapons production facilities in swing states,
promoted
the head of Lockheed Martin using White House resources, appointed defense industry employees to top government jobs
in an unprecedented way and expanded the Pentagon's budget to near-historic highs ― a guarantee of future income for
companies like Lockheed and Boeing.
Trump is "on steroids in terms of promoting arms sales for his own
political benefit," said William Hartung, a scholar at the Center for International Policy who has tracked the defense
industry for decades. "It's a targeted strategy to get benefits from workers in key states."
In courting the billion-dollar industry, Trump has trampled on moral
considerations about how buyers like the Saudis misuse American weapons, ethical concerns about conflicts of interest
and even part of his own political message, the deceptive
claim
that he is a peace candidate. He justifies his policy by citing job growth, but data from
Hartung
,
a prominent analyst, shows he exaggerates the impact. And Trump has made clear that a major motivation for his defense
strategy is the possible electoral benefit it could have.
Next month's election
will show if the bargain was worth it. As of now, it looks like Trump's bet didn't pay off
― for him, at least. Campaign contribution records, analysts in swing states and polls suggest arms dealers have given
the president no significant political boost. The defense contractors, meanwhile, are expected to
continue
getting richer, as they have in a dramatic
way
under Trump.
Playing Corporate Favorites
Trump has thrice chosen the person who decides how the Defense Department
spends its gigantic budget. Each time, he has tapped someone from a business that wants those Pentagon dollars. Mark
Esper, the current defense secretary, worked for Raytheon; his predecessor, Pat Shanahan, for Boeing; and Trump's first
appointee, Jim Mattis, for General Dynamics, which reappointed him to its board soon after he left the administration.
Of the senior officials serving under Esper, almost half have connections
to military contractors,
per
the Project on Government Oversight. The administration is now rapidly trying to fill more Pentagon jobs under the guidance
of a former Trump campaign worker, Foreign Policy magazine recently
revealed
― prioritizing political reasons and loyalty to Trump in choosing people who could help craft policy even under a
Joe Biden
presidency.
Such personnel choices are hugely important for defense companies'
profit margins and risk creating corruption or the impression of it. Watchdog groups argue Trump's handling of the hiring
process is more evidence that lawmakers and future presidents must institute rules to limit the reach of military contractors
and other special interests.
"Given the hundreds of conflicts of interest flouting the rule of
law in the
Trump administration
, certainly these issues have gotten that much more attention and are that much more salient
now than they were four years ago," said Aaron Scherb, the director of legislative affairs at Common Cause, a nonpartisan
good-government group.
The theoretical dangers of Trump's approach became a reality last
year, when a former employee for the weapons producer Raytheon used his job at the State Department to advocate for a
rare emergency declaration allowing the Saudis and their partner the United Arab Emirates to buy $8 billion in arms ―
including $2 billion in Raytheon products ― despite congressional objections. As other department employees warned that
Saudi Arabia was defying U.S. pressure to behave less brutally in Yemen, former lobbyist Charles Faulkner led a unit
that urged Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo
to give the kingdom more weapons. Pompeo
pushed
out Faulkner soon afterward, and earlier this year, the State Department's inspector general
criticized
the process behind the emergency declaration for the arms.
MOHAMED AL-SAYAGHI / REUTERS
Red
Crescent medics walk next to bags containing the bodies of victims of Saudi-linked airstrikes on a Houthi detention center
in Yemen on Sept. 1, 2019. The Saudis military campaign in Yemen has relied on U.S. weaponry to commit scores of alleged
war crimes.
Even Trump administration officials not clearly connected to the
defense industry have shown an interest in moves that benefit it. In 2017, White House economic advisor Peter Navarro
pressured
Republican lawmakers to permit exports to Saudi Arabia and Jared
Kushner, the president's counselor and son-in-law, personally
spoke
with Lockheed Martin's chief to iron out a sale to the kingdom, The New York Times found.
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From Washington to the campaign trail, get the latest politics news.
When Congress gave the Pentagon $1 billion to develop medical supplies
as part of this year's
coronavirus
relief package, most of the money went to defense contractors for projects like jet engine parts instead,
a Washington Post investigation
showed
.
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"It's a very close relationship and there's no kind of sense that
they're supposed to be regulating these people," Hartung said. "It's more like they're allies, standing shoulder to shoulder."
Seeking Payback
In June 2019, Lockheed Martin announced that it would close a facility
that manufactures helicopters in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, and employs more than 450 people. Days later, Trump tweeted
that he had asked the company's then-chief executive, Marillyn Hewson, to keep the plant open. And by July 10, Lockheed
said
it would do so ― attributing the decision to Trump.
The president has frequently claimed credit for jobs in the defense
industry, highlighting the impact on manufacturing in swing states rather than employees like Washington lobbyists, whose
numbers have also
grown
as he has expanded the Pentagon's budget. Lockheed has helped him in his messaging: In one instance in Wisconsin, Hewson
announced
she was adding at least 45 new positions at a plant directly after Trump spoke there, saying his tax cuts for corporations
made that possible.
Trump is pursuing a strategy that the arms industry uses to insulate
itself from political criticism. "They've reached their tentacles into every state and many congressional districts,"
Scherb of Common Cause said. That makes it hard for elected officials to question their operations or Pentagon spending
generally without looking like they are harming their local economy.
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, a Democrat who represents Coatesville,
welcomed
Lockheed's change of course, though she warned, "This decision is a temporary reprieve. I am concerned that Lockheed
Martin and [its subsidiary] Sikorsky are playing politics with the livelihoods of people in my community."
The political benefit for Trump, though, remains in question, given
that as president he has a broad set of responsibilities and is judged in different ways.
"Do I think it's important to keep jobs? Absolutely," said Marcel
Groen, a former Pennsylvania Democratic party chair. "And I think we need to thank the congresswoman and thank the president
for it. But it doesn't change my views and I don't think it changes most people's in terms of the state of the nation."
With polls showing that Trump's disastrous response to the
health pandemic
dominates voters' thoughts and Biden sustaining a lead
in surveys of most swing states
, his argument on defense industry jobs seems like a minor factor in this election.
Hartung of the Center for International Policy drew a parallel to
President George H.W. Bush, who during his 1992 reelection campaign promoted plans for Taiwan and Saudi Arabia to purchase
fighter jets produced in Missouri and Texas. Bush
announced
the
decisions
at events at the General Dynamics facility in Fort Worth, Texas, and the McDonnell Douglas plant in St. Louis that made
the planes. That November, as Bill Clinton defeated him, he lost Missouri by the highest
margin
of any Republican in almost 30 years and won Texas by a slimmer
margin
than had become the norm for a GOP presidential candidate.
MANDEL NGAN VIA GETTY IMAGES
President
Donald Trump greets then-Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson at the Derco Aerospace Inc. plant in Milwaukee on July 12,
2019. Trump does not appear to be winning his political bet that increased defense spending would help his political
fortunes.
Checking The Receipts
The defense industry can't control whether voters buy Trump's arguments
about his relationship with it. But it could, if it wanted to, try to help him politically in a more direct way: by donating
to his reelection campaign and allied efforts.
Yet arms manufacturers aren't reciprocating Trump's affection. A
HuffPost review of Federal Election Commission records showed that top figures and groups at major industry organizations
like the National Defense Industrial Association and the Aerospace Industries Association and at Lockheed, Trump's favorite
defense firm, are donating this cycle much as they normally do: giving to both sides of the political aisle, with a slight
preference to the party currently wielding the most power, which for now is Republicans. (The few notable exceptions
include the chairman of the NDIA's board, Arnold Punaro, who has given more than $58,000 to Trump and others in the GOP.)
Data from the Center for Responsive Politics
shows
that's the case for contributions from the next three biggest groups of defense industry donors after Lockheed's employees.
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One smaller defense company, AshBritt Environmental, did
donate
$500,000 to a political action committee supporting Trump ― prompting a complaint from the Campaign Legal Center, which
noted that businesses that take federal dollars are not allowed to make campaign contributions. Its founder
told
ProPublica he meant to make a personal donation.
For weapons producers, backing both parties makes sense. The military
budget will have increased 29% under Trump by the end of the current fiscal year,
per
the White House Office of Management and Budget. Biden has
said
he doesn't see cuts as "inevitable" if he is elected, and his circle of advisers includes many from the national security
world who have worked closely with ― and in many cases worked for ― the defense industry.
And arms manufacturers are "busy pursuing their own interests" in
other ways, like trying to get a piece of additional government stimulus legislation, Hartung said ― an effort that's
underway as the Pentagon's inspector general
investigates
how defense contractors got so much of the first coronavirus relief package.
Meanwhile, defense contractors continue to have an outsize effect
on the way policies are designed in Washington through less political means. A recent report from the Center for International
Policy found that such companies have given at least $1 billion to the nation's most influential think tanks since 2014
― potentially spending taxpayer money to influence public opinion. They have also found less obvious ways to maintain
support from powerful people, like running the databases that many congressional offices use to connect with constituents,
Scherb of Common Cause said.
"This goes into a much bigger systemic issue about big money in politics
and the role of corporations versus the role of Americans," Scherb said.
Given its reach, the defense industry has little reason to appear
overtly partisan. Instead, it's projecting confidence despite the generally dreary state of the global economy: Boeing
CEO Dave Calhoun
has said
he expects similar approaches from either winner of the election,
arguing even greater Democratic control and the rise of less conventional lawmakers isn't a huge concern.
In short, whoever is in the White House, arms dealers tend to do
just fine.
Is this 50 former Intel officials or 50 former national security parasites? Real Intel
officials should keep quite after retirement. National security parasites go to politics and
lobbying. One telling sign that a particular parson is a "national security parasite" is his
desire to play "Russian card"
From comments: "Did the 50 former intelligence officials find the Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction yet?"
Hours before Politico
reported the existence of a letter signed by '50 former senior intelligence officials' who say
the Hunter Biden laptop scandal "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information
operation" - providing "no new evidence," while they remain "deeply suspicious that the Russian
government played a significant role in this case," Tucker Carlson obliterated their (literal)
conspiracy theory .
According to the Fox News host, he's seen 'nonpublic information that proves it was Hunter's
laptop ,' adding " No one but Hunter could've known about or replicated this information ."
" This is not a Russian hoax. We are not speculating ."
TUCKER: "This afternoon, we received nonpublic information that proves it was Hunter's
laptop. No one but Hunter could've known about or replicated this information. This is not a
Russian hoax. We are not speculating." pic.twitter.com/cl2ktdmdVc
Meanwhile, the Delaware computer repair shop owner who believes Hunter dropped off three
MacBook Pros for data recovery has a signed work order bearing Hunter's signature . When
compared to the signature on a document in his paternity suit, while one looks more formal than
the other, they are a match.
Going back to the '50 former senior intelligence officials' and their latest Russia
fixation, one has to wonder - do they think Putin was able to compromise Biden's
former business associate , Bevan Cooney, who gave investigative journalist Peter Schweizer
his gmail password - revealing that Hunter and his partners were engaged in an
influence-peddling operation for rich Chinese who wanted access to the Obama
administration?
Did Putin further hack Joe Biden in 2011 to make him take a meeting with a Chinese
delegation with ties to the CCP - arranged by Hunter's group, two years they secured a massive
investment of Chinese money?
The implications boggle the mind.
Here's the clarifying sentences from the '50 former senior intelligence officials' that
exposes the utter farce of it all:
While the letter's signatories presented no new evidence , they said their national
security experience had made them "deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a
significant role in this case" and cited several elements of the story that suggested the
Kremlin's hand at work.
"If we are right," they added, "this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in
this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this."
"Hunter Biden's laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign."
And then there's the fact that no one from the Biden campaign has yet to deny any of the
'facts' in the emails. lay_arrow jin187 , 2 hours ago
Totally ridiculous. This ******** beating around the bush for both sides pisses me off.
Dump all the laptop contents on Wikileaks if it's real. Let the people sort it out. If you
say it's not real, prove it. If Biden wants me to believe it's not real, then stand behind a
podium, and say clear as day into a pile of cameras that's it's all a forgery, and that
you've done nothing wrong.
Instead we have Giuliani swearing he has a smoking gun, but as far as I can tell he's just
pointing his finger underneath his shirt. Biden on the other hand, keep using weasel words to
imply it's fake, but never denies it outright. It's almost like he's trying to hedge his bet
that no one will manage to prove it's real before he gets into office, and makes it
disappear.
Roacheforque , 7 hours ago
To play the "Russian Card" yet again should be beyond embarrassing. An insult to the
intelligence of anyone with an IQ over 80. And so it's harmful to the left wingnut
derangeables. Like Assad's chemical weapons and Saddam's WMDs, it is now code for pure
********. Not even code, just more like a signal.
A signal that say's "guilty as charged - we got nothin' but lies and BS over here".
East Indian , 4 hours ago
An insult to the intelligence of anyone with an IQ over 80.
They know their supporters wont find this insulting.
Kayman , 4 hours ago
@vulvishka.
538 ? North Korea has better propaganda.
Don't forget to go all in, like you did with Hillary.
Antedeluvian , 2 hours ago
Unfortunately, some very bright people are sucked into the conspiracy theory. I know one.
Very bright lawyer. She says, "I still think there is substantive evidence of Russian
collusion." I can point to a sky criss-crossed with chemtrails (when you see these
"contrails" crossing at the same altitude, this is one sure clue these are not from regular
passenger jet traffic) and she refuses to look up. She KNOWS I am an idiot (a PhD scientist
idiot at that) because I get news and analysis on the web from sites that just want to sell
me tee shirts and coffee mugs (well, she is partly right there!) whereas she gets her news
from MSNBC, a venerable and trustworthy news source.
4DegreesOfSeparation , 6 hours ago
More Than 50 Former Intel Officials Say Hunter Biden Smear Smells Like Russia
"If we are right," the group wrote in a letter, "this is Russia trying to influence how
Americans vote."
DescendantofthePatriots , 7 hours ago
That ****, James Clapper, signed his name at the top of this list.
Known liar, saboteur, and sneak.
The cognitive dissonance in our country is astounding. The fact that they would take these
people's opinion over hard fact is astounding.
No wonder why we're sliding down the steep, slippery slope.
strych10 , 8 hours ago
So... let me get this straight.
50, that's 10 times five, fifty former intelligence officials are going with a convoluted
narrative about a ludicrously complicated Russian Intelligence disinformation campaign
involving planted laptops and at least half a dozen patsies when the two words "crack
cocaine" explain the entire thing?
I'm not sure what's more terrifying; That these people think everyone else is dumb enough
to believe this or that they're actually retired intelligence officials
.
Who the actual **** is running this ****show? The bastard child of Barney Fife and
Inspector Clouseau?
Seriously, "Pink Panther Disinformation Operation" is more believable at this point.
Someone Else , 9 hours ago
This needs to get out, because a FAVORITE method of the Deep State, Democrats and the
media (but I repeat myself) is to parade some sort of a stupid letter with a bunch of
signature hoping to look impressive but that really don't mean a damn thing.
Notre Dame graduates against the Supreme Court nominee, Intelligence agents alleging
collusion, former State Department operatives against Trump. Its grandstanding that has been
overdone.
moneybots , 8 hours ago
The letter by 50 former intelligence officials is itself, disinformation.
otschelnik , 8 hours ago
Remember when Weiner's attorney turned over Huma's home laptop to SDNY/FBI with all of
Shillary's emails, and the FBI sat on it for a month and then Comey deep sixed them without
even looking at them?
So now the FBI subpeona'd Hunter's laptop and burried it? Deja vu all over again.
enough of this , 8 hours ago
The FBI and DOJ constantly hide behind self-serving excuses to refuse the release of
documents and, when forced to do so, they release heavily redacted files. They offer up the
usual pretexts to fend off public disclosure such as: the information you seek cannot be
disclosed because it involves an ongoing investigation, or the information you seek involves
national security, or our methods and sources will be jeopardized if the information you seek
is divulged to the public. But it seems the ones who would be most harmed by public
disclosure are the corrupt FBI and DOJ officials themselves
Cobra Commander , 7 hours ago
A short 4 years ago the FBI and CIA were all concerned about "Kompromat" the Ruskies might
have on Candidate Trump; concerned enough to spy on his campaign and open a
counter-intelligence operation.
There are troves of Kompromat material, actual emails and video, on Joe, Hunter, and the
whole Biden family; not made-up DNC-funded dossiers claiming a Russian consulate in
Miami.
Now when it's Candidate Biden, everyone be all like, "Meh."
Cobra!
The Fonz...before shark jump , 5 hours ago
we gotta listen to the 50 former intelligence agents...you know the ones that had lone
superpower status in the early 90s and then pissed it all away with 9/11 and infinity wars in
middle east hahahahah ok buddy lol... histories D students....
Occams_Razor_Trader_Part_Deux , 7 hours ago
Signed by James Clapper and John Brennan;
You mean, the 2 Bozos who under the threat of perjury said there was NO evidence of
Russian Collusion and the Trump campaign................. and 2 hours later called Trump
'Putin's puppet' on CNN.............
"... When the matter of truth is depicted as a possible threat to those that govern a country, you no longer have a democratic state. True, not everything can be disclosed to the public in real time, but we are sitting on a mountain of classified intelligence material that goes back more than 60 years. ..."
"... From this recognition, the whole matter of declassifying material around the Russigate scandal in real time, and not highly redacted 50 years from now, is essential to addressing this festering putrefaction that has been bubbling over since the heinous assassination of President Kennedy on Nov. 22nd, 1963 and to which we are still waiting for full disclosure of classified papers 57 years later. ..."
"... These intelligence bureaus need to be reviewed for what kind of method and standard they are upholding in collecting their "intelligence," that has supposedly justified the Mueller investigation and the never-ending Flynn investigation which have provided zero conclusive evidence to back up their allegations and which have massively infringed on the elected government's ability to make the changes that they had committed to the American people. ..."
"... Just like the Iraq and Libya war that was based off of cooked British intelligence (refer here and here ), Russiagate appears to have also had its impetus from our friends over at MI6 as well. It is no surprise that Sir Richard Dearlove, who was then MI6 chief (1999-2004) and who oversaw and stood by the fraudulent intelligence on Iraq stating they bought uranium from Niger to build a nuclear weapon, is the very same Sir Richard Dearlove who promoted the Christopher Steele dossier as something "credible" to American intelligence. ..."
"... In other words, the same man who is largely responsible for encouraging the illegal invasion of Iraq, which set off the never-ending wars on "terror," that was justified with cooked British intelligence is also responsible for encouraging the Russian spook witch-hunt that has been occurring within the US for the last four years over more cooked British intelligence, and the FBI and CIA are knowingly complicit in this. ..."
"... "The Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human experimentation led to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s." [emphasis added] ..."
"... On Dec. 22, 1974, The New York Times published an article by Seymour Hersh exposing illegal operations conducted by the CIA, dubbed the "family jewels". This included, covert action programs involving assassination attempts on foreign leaders and covert attempts to subvert foreign governments, which were reported for the first time. In addition, the article discussed efforts by intelligence agencies to collect information on the political activities of US citizens. ..."
"... Largely as a reaction to Hersh's findings, the creation of the Church Committee was approved on January 27, 1975, by a vote of 82 to 4 in the Senate. ..."
"... In addition, the Church Committee produced seven case studies on covert operations, but only the one on Chile was released, titled " Covert Action in Chile: 1963–1973 ". The rest were kept secret at the CIA's request. ..."
"... Among the most shocking revelation of the Church Committee was the discovery of Operation SHAMROCK , in which the major telecommunications companies shared their traffic with the NSA from 1945 to the early 1970s. The information gathered in this operation fed directly into the NSA Watch List. It was found out during the committee investigations that Senator Frank Church, who was overseeing the committee, was among the prominent names under surveillance on this NSA Watch List. ..."
"... According to Garrison's team findings, there was reason to believe that the CIA was involved in the orchestrations of President Kennedy's assassination but access to classified material (which was nearly everything concerning the case) was necessary to continue such an investigation. ..."
"... Though Garrison's team lacked direct evidence, they were able to collect an immense amount of circumstantial evidence, which should have given the justification for access to classified material for further investigation. Instead the case was thrown out of court prematurely and is now treated as if it were a circus. [Refer to Garrison's book for further details and Oliver Stone's excellently researched movie JFK ] ..."
"... On Oct. 6th, 2020, President Trump ordered the declassification of the Russia Probe documents along with the classified documents on the findings concerning the Hillary Clinton emails. The release of these documents threatens to expose the entrapment of the Trump campaign by the Clinton campaign with help of the US intelligence agencies. ..."
"... Trey Gowdy, who was Chair of the House Oversight Committee from June 13th, 2017 – Jan. 3rd, 2019, has stated in an interview on Oct. 7th, 2020 that he has never seen these documents. Devin Nunes, who was Chair of the House Intelligence Committee from Jan. 3rd, 2015 – Jan. 3rd, 2019, has also said in a recent interview that he has never seen these documents. ..."
"... Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation . ..."
"Treason doth never prosper; what is the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it
treason." – Sir John Harrington.
As Shakespeare would state in his play Hamlet, "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,"
like a fish that rots from head to tail, so do corrupt government systems rot from top to
bottom.
This is a reference to the ruling system of Denmark and not just the foul murder that King
Claudius has committed against his brother, Hamlet's father. This is showcased in the play by
reference to the economy of Denmark being in a state of shambles and that the Danish people are
ready to revolt since they are on the verge of starving. King Claudius has only been king for a
couple of months, and thus this state of affairs, though he inflames, did not originate with
him.
Thus, during our time of great upheaval we should ask ourselves; what constitutes the
persisting "ruling system," of the United States, and where do the injustices in its state of
affairs truly originate from?
The tragedy of Hamlet does not just lie in the action (or lack of action) of one man, but
rather, it is contained in the choices and actions of all its main characters. Each character
fails to see the longer term consequences of their own actions, which leads not only to their
ruin but towards the ultimate collapse of Denmark. The characters are so caught up in their
antagonism against one another that they fail to foresee that their very own destruction is
intertwined with the other.
This is a reflection of a failing system.
A system that, though it believes itself to be fighting tooth and nail for its very
survival, is only digging a deeper grave. A system that is incapable of generating any real
solutions to the problems it faces.
The only way out of this is to address that very fact. The most important issue that will
decide the fate of the country is what sort of changes are going to occur in the political and
intelligence apparatus, such that a continuation of this tyrannical treason is finally stopped
in its tracks and unable to sow further discord and chaos.
When the Matter of "Truth" Becomes a Threat to "National Security"
When the matter of truth is depicted as a possible threat to those that govern a
country, you no longer have a democratic state. True, not everything can be disclosed to the
public in real time, but we are sitting on a mountain of classified intelligence material that
goes back more than 60 years.
How much time needs to elapse before the American people have the right to know the truth
behind what their government agencies have been doing within their own country and abroad in
the name of the "free" world?
From this recognition, the whole matter of declassifying material around the Russigate
scandal in real time, and not highly redacted 50 years from now, is essential to addressing
this festering putrefaction that has been bubbling over since the
heinous assassination of President Kennedy on Nov. 22nd, 1963 and to which we are still
waiting for full disclosure of classified papers 57 years later.
If the American people really want to finally see who is standing behind that curtain in Oz,
now is the time.
These intelligence bureaus need to be reviewed for what kind of method and standard they
are upholding in collecting their "intelligence," that has supposedly justified the Mueller
investigation and the never-ending Flynn investigation which have provided zero conclusive
evidence to back up their allegations and which have massively infringed on the elected
government's ability to make the changes that they had committed to the American
people.
Just like the Iraq and Libya war that was based off of cooked British intelligence
(refer here
and here ),
Russiagate appears to have also had its impetus from our friends over at MI6 as well. It is no
surprise that Sir Richard Dearlove, who was then MI6 chief (1999-2004) and who
oversaw and stood by the fraudulent intelligence on Iraq stating they bought uranium from
Niger to build a nuclear weapon, is the very same Sir Richard Dearlove who promoted the
Christopher Steele dossier as something "credible" to American intelligence.
In other words, the same man who is largely responsible for encouraging the illegal
invasion of Iraq, which set off the never-ending wars on "terror," that was justified with
cooked British intelligence is also responsible for encouraging the Russian spook witch-hunt
that has been occurring within the US for the last four years over more cooked British
intelligence, and the FBI and CIA are knowingly complicit in this.
Neither the American people, nor the world as a whole, can afford to suffer any more of the
so-called "mistaken" intelligence bumblings. It is time that these intelligence bureaus are
held accountable for at best criminal negligence, at worst, treason against their own
country.
When Great Figures of Hope Are Targeted as Threats to "National Security"
The Family Jewels
report , which was an investigation conducted by the CIA to investigate itself, was spurred
by the Watergate Scandal and the CIA's unconstitutional role in the whole affair. This
investigation by the CIA reviewed its own conduct from the 1950s to mid-1970s.
The Family Jewels report was only partially declassified in June 25, 2007 (30
years later). Along with the release of the redacted report included a six-page summary with
the following introduction:
"The Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of
illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human experimentation led
to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s." [emphasis added]
Despite this acknowledged violation of its charter for 25 years, which is pretty much since
its inception, the details of this information were kept classified for 30 years from not just
the public but major governmental bodies and it was left to the agency itself to judge how best
to "reform" its ways.
On Dec. 22, 1974, The
New York Times published an article by Seymour Hersh exposing illegal operations conducted
by the CIA, dubbed the "family jewels". This included, covert action programs involving
assassination attempts on foreign leaders and covert attempts to subvert foreign governments,
which were reported for the first time. In addition, the article discussed efforts by
intelligence agencies to collect information on the political activities of US
citizens.
Largely as a reaction to Hersh's findings, the creation of the Church Committee was
approved on January 27, 1975, by a vote of 82 to 4 in the Senate.
The Church Committee also published an interim
report titled "Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders", which investigated
alleged attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of Zaire, Rafael
Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam, Gen. René Schneider of Chile
and Fidel Castro of Cuba. President Ford attempted to withhold the report from the public, but
failed and reluctantly issued Executive
Order 11905 after pressure from the public and the Church Committee.
Executive Order 11905 is a United States Presidential Executive Order signed on February 18,
1976, by a very reluctant President Ford in an attempt to reform the United States Intelligence
Community, improve oversight on foreign intelligence activities, and ban political
assassination.
The attempt is now regarded as a failure and was largely undone by President Reagan who
issued Executive
Order 12333 , which extended the powers and responsibilities of US intelligence agencies
and directed leaders of the US federal agencies to co-operate fully with the CIA, which was the
original arrangement that CIA have full authority over clandestine operations (for more
information on this refer to my papers
here and
here ).
In addition, the Church Committee produced seven case studies on covert operations, but
only the one on Chile was released, titled " Covert Action in
Chile: 1963–1973 ". The rest were kept secret at the CIA's request.
Among the most shocking revelation of the Church Committee was the discovery of
Operation SHAMROCK ,
in which the major telecommunications companies shared their traffic with the NSA from 1945 to
the early 1970s. The information gathered in this operation fed directly into the NSA Watch
List. It was found out during the committee investigations that Senator Frank Church, who was
overseeing the committee, was among the prominent
names under surveillance on this NSA Watch List.
In 1975, the Church Committee decided to unilaterally declassify the particulars of this
operation, against the objections of President Ford's administration (refer here and
here for more information).
The Church Committee's reports constitute the most extensive review of intelligence
activities ever made available to the public. Much of the contents were classified, but over
50,000 pages were declassified under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records
Collection Act of 1992.
President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on Nov. 22nd, 1963. Two days before his
assassination a hate-Kennedy handbill (see picture) was circulated in Dallas accusing the
president of treasonous activities including being a communist sympathizer.
On March 1st, 1967 New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison arrested and charged Clay Shaw
with conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy, with the help of David Ferrie and others.
After a little over a one month long trial, Shaw was found not guilty on March 1st, 1969.
David Ferrie, a controller of Lee Harvey Oswald, was going to be a key witness and would
have provided the "smoking gun" evidence linking himself to Clay Shaw, was likely murdered on
Feb. 22nd, 1967, less than a week after news of Garrison's investigation broke in the
media.
According to Garrison's team findings, there was reason to believe that the CIA was
involved in the orchestrations of President Kennedy's assassination but access to classified
material (which was nearly everything concerning the case) was necessary to continue such an
investigation.
Though Garrison's team lacked direct evidence, they were able to collect an immense
amount of circumstantial evidence, which should have given the justification for access to
classified material for further investigation. Instead the case was thrown out of court
prematurely and is now treated as if it were a circus. [Refer to Garrison's book for further details and
Oliver Stone's excellently researched movie JFK ]
To date, it is the only trial to be brought forward concerning the assassination of
President Kennedy.
The Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) was created in 1994 by the Congress enacted
President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which mandated that all
assassination-related material be housed in a single collection within the National Archives
and Records Administration. In July 1998, a staff report
released by the ARRB emphasized shortcomings in the original autopsy.
The
ARRB wrote , "One of the many tragedies of the assassination of President Kennedy has been
the incompleteness of the autopsy record and the suspicion caused by the shroud of secrecy that
has surrounded the records that do exist." [emphasis added]
Asked about the lunchroom episode [where he was overheard stating his notes of the autopsy
went missing] in a May 1996 deposition, Finck said he did not remember it. He was also vague
about how many notes he took during the autopsy but confirmed that 'after the autopsy I also
wrote notes' and that he turned over whatever notes he had to the chief autopsy physician,
James J. Humes.
It has long been known that Humes destroyed some original autopsy papers in a fireplace at
his home on Nov. 24, 1963. He told the Warren Commission that what he burned was an original
draft of his autopsy report. Under persistent questioning at a February 1996 deposition by
the Review Board, Humes said he destroyed the draft and his 'original notes.'
Shown official autopsy photographs of Kennedy from the National Archives, [Saundra K.]
Spencer [who worked in 'the White House lab'] said they were not the ones she helped process
and were printed on different paper. She said 'there was no blood or opening cavities' and
the wounds were much smaller in the pictures [than what she had] worked on
John T. Stringer, who said he was the only one to take photos during the autopsy itself,
said some of those were missing as well. He said that pictures he took of Kennedy's brain at
a 'supplementary autopsy' were different from the official set that was shown to him.
[emphasis added]
This not only shows that evidence tampering did indeed occur, as even the Warren
Commission acknowledges, but this puts into question the reliability of the entire
assassination record of John F. Kennedy and to what degree evidence tampering and forgery have
occurred in these records.
We would also do well to remember the numerous crimes that the FBI and CIA have been guilty
of committing upon the American people such as during the period of McCarthyism. That the FBI's
COINTELPRO has been implicated in covert operations against members of the civil rights
movement, including Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1960s. That FBI director J. Edgar Hoover
made no secret of his hostility towards Dr. King and his ludicrous belief that King was
influenced by communists, despite having no evidence to that effect.
King was assassinated on April 4th, 1968 and the civil rights movement took a major
blow.
In November 1975, as the Church Committee was completing its investigation, the Department
of Justice formed a Task Force to examine the FBI's program of harassment directed at Dr. King,
including the FBI's security investigations of him, his assassination and the FBI conducted
criminal investigation that followed. One aspect of the Task force study was to determine
"whether any action taken in relation to Dr. King by the FBI before the assassination had, or
might have had, an effect, direct or indirect, on that event."
In its report
, the Task Force criticized the FBI not for the opening, but for the protracted continuation
of, its security investigation of Dr. King:
"We think the security investigation which included both physical and technical
surveillance, should have been terminated in 1963. That it was intensified and augmented by a
COINTELPRO type campaign against Dr. King was unwarranted; the COINTELPRO type campaign,
moreover, was ultra vires and very probably felonious."
In 1999, King Family
v. Jowers civil suit in Memphis, Tennessee occurred, the full transcript of the trial can
be found here
. The jury found that Lloyd Jowers and unnamed others, including those in high ranking
positions within government agencies, participated in a conspiracy to assassinate Dr. King.
During the four week trial, it was pointed out that the rifle allegedly used to assassinate
King did not have a scope that was sighted, which meant you could not have hit the broad side
of a barn with that rifle, thus it could not have been the murder weapon.
This was only remarked on over 30 years after King was murdered and showed the level of
incompetence, or more likely, evidence tampering that was committed from previous
investigations conducted by the FBI.
The case of JFK and MLK are among the highest profile assassination cases in American
history, and it has been shown in both cases that evidence tampering has indeed occurred,
despite being in the center of the public eye. What are we then to expect as the standard of
investigation for all the other cases of malfeasance? What expectation can we have that justice
is ever upheld?
With a history of such blatant misconduct, it is clear that the present demand to declassify
the Russiagate papers now, and not 50 years later, needs to occur if we are to address the
level of criminality that is going on behind the scenes and which will determine the fate of
the country.
The American People Deserve to Know
Today we see the continuation of the over seven decades' long ruse, the targeting of
individuals as Russian agents without any basis, in order to remove them from the political
arena. The present effort to declassify the Russiagate papers and exonerate Michael Flynn, so
that he may freely speak of the intelligence he knows, is not a threat to national security, it
is a threat to those who have committed treason against their country.
On Oct. 6th, 2020, President Trump ordered the declassification of the Russia Probe
documents along with the classified documents on the findings concerning the Hillary Clinton
emails. The release of these documents threatens to expose the entrapment of the Trump campaign
by the Clinton campaign with help of the US intelligence agencies.
The Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe released some of these documents
recently, including former CIA Director John Brennan's handwritten notes for a meeting with former
President Obama, the notes revealing that Hillary Clinton approved a plan to "vilify Donald
Trump by stirring up scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service."
Trey Gowdy, who was Chair of the House Oversight Committee from June 13th, 2017 –
Jan. 3rd, 2019, has stated in an interview on Oct. 7th, 2020 that
he has never seen these documents. Devin Nunes, who was Chair of the House Intelligence
Committee from Jan. 3rd, 2015 – Jan. 3rd, 2019, has also said in a recent interview that
he has never seen these documents.
And yet, both the FBI and CIA were aware and had access to these documents and sat on them
for four years, withholding their release from several government-led investigations that were
looking into the Russiagate scandal and who were requesting relevant material that was in the
possession of both intelligence bureaus. Do these intelligence bureaus sound like they are
working for the "national security" of the American people?
The truth must finally be brought to light, or the country will rot from its head to
tail.
Crucially, China is not the Soviet Union: China has no messianic ideology to export; China
is not engaged in regime change operations to create an ideological sphere of influence;
China's relationships with foreign nations are transactional rather than sentimental; China's
economy dwarfs that of the USSR; China already possesses one-fourth of the world's scientific,
technological, engineering, and mathematics workforce; China's "Belt and Road Initiative" is an
order-setting geoeconomic strategy with no Soviet parallel; China spends two percent or less of
it GDP on its military vs. the estimated 9 to 15 percent of the USSR -- and China has not built
a nuclear arsenal to match that of either the United States or Russia.
Equally important, the United States of the 2020s is not the America of the early Cold War.
As the Cold War began, the United States produced one-half or more of the world's manufactures.
It now makes about one-sixth. During the Cold War, the United States was the uncontested leader
of a bloc of dependent nations that it called "the free world." That bloc is now in an advanced
state of decay. Further, legacy U.S. alliances formed to contain the USSR have little relevance
to American contention with China: US-European alliances like NATO are withering and no Asian
security partner of the United States wants to choose between America and China.
Since 1950, the Taiwan issue has been a casus belli between the United States and
China. But U.S. allies see it as a fight among Chinese to be managed rather than joined. If the
U.S. mismanages the Taiwan issue, as it now appears to be doing, it will have no overt allies
in the resulting war. No claimant against China in the South China Sea is prepared to join the
U.S. in naval conflict with China. In short, this time is different. Sino-American relations
have a history and dynamic that do not conform to those of the US-Soviet contest. And the
United States is not equipped to inspire and lead opposition to China. The US-China contention
is far broader than that of the Cold War, in part because China, unlike the determinedly
autarkic USSR, is part of the same global society as the United States. The battlefields
include global governance, geoeconomics, trade, investment, finance, currency usage, supply
chain management, technology standards and systems, and scientific collaboration, in addition
to the geopolitical and military domains in which the Cold War played out.
The United States is isolated on a widening list of issues. It has withdrawn or excluded
itself from a growing number of multilateral instruments of global and regional governance and
is no longer able to lead the international community. Americans have repeatedly declined to
recapitalize or cooperate in reforming international financial institutions to meet new global
and regional investment requirements. This has led China, India, and other rising powers to
create supplementary lenders like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New
Development Bank.
Four years ago, the U.S. unilaterally decided that geopolitics are inherently driven by
great power military rivalry that precludes cooperation. The newly pugnacious U.S. stance
legitimizes xenophobia and justifies bilateral approaches to foreign relations that ignore
issues like global terrorism, pandemic diseases, climate change, migration, nuclear
proliferation, or regional tensions, and cripple the global governance and international
coordination needed to tackle them. The United States is going out of its way to demonstrate
its indifference to the interests and sensibilities of its past and potential partners. It is
withdrawing from international organizations it can no longer dominate. These actions amount to
unilateral diplomatic disarmament and the creation of politico-economic vacuums for others --
not just China -- to fill.
Future historians will puzzle over why Americans have chosen to dismantle and discard the
connections and capacities that long enabled the United States to direct the trend of events in
most global and regional arenas. When they unravel this mystery, they will also need to explain
the simultaneous collapse of the separation of powers structure on which the American republic
was founded and on which its liberties were built. Fortunately for post-Constitutional America,
China's political system, despite the stability and prosperity it has fostered, has even less
appeal beyond China's borders. Both China and the United States are now repelling other nations
rather than attracting them. If the U.S.-China contest were military and didn't go nuclear, the
United States, with its battle-hardened and uniquely lethal military, would enjoy insuperable
advantages. But armed conflict is not the central element in the Sino-American
confrontation.
After World War II, the United States made the rules. American statesmen crafted a world
order that expressed American ideals and served American interests. In the post-Cold War period
Washington began to disengage from the global institutions and norms it had sponsored. The
United States has failed to ratify international compacts that regulate a widening range of
arenas of importance to it. These include conventions on the law of the sea, nuclear testing,
the arms trade, human rights, and crimes against humanity. Washington has withdrawn from or
suspended compliance with conventions on the laws of war and agreements on arms control,
combating climate change, and trade and investment. It has ceased to participate in or sought
to sabotage a growing list of United Nations specialized agencies and related institutions.
Notwithstanding the current global pandemic, these include the World Health Organization.
America's withdrawal from its traditional role in global rule-setting and enforcement
deprives it of the dominant influence it long exercised through the institutions it created.
Other great powers remain wedded to the American-led order expressed in the United Nations
Charter, but America's exemption of itself from the comity of nations and its spontaneous
metamorphosis from world leader to global dropout have left it unable to aggregate the power of
other nations to its own. Washington's resort to abusive language, threats and coercive
measures has grown as its capacity to apply its power non-coercively has declined, further
reducing the numbers of foreign allies, partners, and friends willing to bandwagon with
America.
The decline in U.S. clout is made even more consequential by the fact that China has
resources, including money, to offer its partners. The United States does not. The United
States' budget is in chronic deficit. Even routine government operations must now be funded
with debt. America has spent trillions of borrowed dollars on wars in the Islamic world that it
can neither win nor end. Its "forever wars" siphoned off the funds needed to keep its human and
physical infrastructure at levels competitive with those of China and other great economic
powers. They also crippled U.S. statecraft by defunding non-military means to advance American
interests abroad and curtailing U.S. contributions to the international institutions charged
with assuring global peace and development.
Coercive approaches to statecraft are inherently alienating. Claims to superiority that are
not empirically substantiable are unpersuasive. Asking countries to choose between China and
the United States, when China is clearly rising and America is simultaneously stagnating and
declining, guarantees the progressive eclipse of American prestige and power. Advocating
democracy abroad while deviating from it at home destroys rather than enhances American
credibility. America's addiction to debt risks eventual financial collapse even as it limits
immediate policy options both at home and abroad.
Unless the United States cures its fiscal feebleness, rebuilds the capacities and competence
of its government, upgrades its human and physical infrastructure, and reopens itself to trade,
investment, and immigration, America's roles in global governance, trade, investment, finance,
supply chain management, technology standards and systems, and scientific collaboration will
continue to contract as those of China and others expand. The United States' capacity to
innovate will decline, as will American well-being and self-confidence. This diminishment of
the United States is not the consequence of Chinese predation but of American hubris, political
ineptitude, and diplomatic decrepitude .
The essence of any s trategy is the efficient linkage of resources and capabilities to
feasible objectives. Current U.S. China policy is strategy-free. With neither resources nor
institutional capabilities to back it, it amounts to puerile fantasy. U.S. China policy at
present is a classic example of demonizing a foreign foe to rally support at home and divert
attention from festering political, economic, and social problems. This approach is highly
unlikely to result in a Cold War-style victory for the United States or the Enlightenment
values that gave birth to it. Quite the opposite. Written by Chas
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China wins, India loses in Trump's gamble on crushing Iran by Fatemeh Aman
"Adam Schiff is seriously the most pathological liar in all of American politics that I've
seen in all of my time covering politics and journalism," Greenwald said on 'Tucker Carlson
Tonight.' "He just fabricates accusations at the drop of the hat at the other people change
underwear. He's simply lying when he just asserts over and over that the Russians or the
Kremlin are behind the story. He has no idea whether or not that is true. There is no evidence
to support it."
We all like to have our worldview affirmed by a corroborating voice, even if that, too, is
an opinion. This, for me, was like lying back in a hot bath.
I have said as far back as I can remember, during Pompeo's tenure as Giant Blasphemous
Cream Puff of State, that the damage he was doing to the relationship between America and her
allies was significant and perhaps irreparable. The article, if accurate, reveals a China
which is quite a bit like Russia in its official treatment of minorities – subordinate
ethnicities are recognized as distinct societies if their population meets a reasonable
threshold, and where an ethnic population is regionally dominant, an autonomous government is
established to facilitate local governance by people of the same ethnic background.
I was not aware that during the term of China's one-child policy – a dreadful time
which led to the abortion or other more-horrible disposals of unwanted baby girls –
mothers among ethnic minorities were permitted two or even three children.
The article is obviously written in defense of China, but the authors seem to have
substantiated their claims satisfactorily where such material is offered. Unsubstantiated
opinion is often a close match with those offered by commenters on this forum.
George Koo linked to a Youtube video of Mike Pompeous and the Croatian Prime Minister
Andrej Plenkovic at a press conference in Dubrovnik. Watch how Plenkovic deals with
Pompeosity!
I swear I saw the Pompous One deflate considerably after Plenkovic's speech about China's
BRI initiative. Good thing the wind was up and active otherwise the smell would have been
horrific and everyone would have been knocked unconscious.
"... Meanwhile, back on ABC, Joe Biden skated on answering any questions of substance about his son or Antifa or BLM. On NBC, Guthrie pushed Donald Trump to condemn QAnon and White supremacy, and he did it dutifully. But it wasn't enough. The point of demanding performative disavowals isn't to get the disavowal, it's to smear the person you're asking to disavow the group by association with the group. ..."
TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: If you flipped the channel during our show Thursday night, you may
have seen the president and his challenger making their respective cases to voters. But
President Trump and Joe Biden weren't debating each other. That would have been too risky.
There's a massive public health crisis underway, you may have heard.
So to avoid what doomsday hobbyists on Twitter like to call a "superspreader event," Trump
and Biden held separate indoor town halls surrounded by people. They talked to partisan
moderators instead of each other. That might seem like a loss to the country three weeks before
a presidential election. But unfortunately, the science on this question is clear: Nothing
could be more dangerous to America than a televised in-person debate between Joe Biden and
Donald Trump.
So the so-called debate commission made certain a debate couldn't happen. Who benefitted
from that decision? Well, not voters. America has held regularly scheduled presidential debates
for decades and we have them for a reason. The more information voters can get directly from
the candidates rather than the media, the better our democracy functions, not that anyone's
interested in democracy anymore.
Joe Biden doesn't care either way. He just didn't want to talk about Burisma. That's the
scandal that vividly illustrates how, as vice president, Biden subverted this country's foreign
policy in order to enrich his own family. The good news for Biden Thursday night was that he
didn't have to talk about it. No one from ABC News asked him about that scandal for the entire
90 minutes.
As we've been telling you this week, the New York Post and a few other news outlets,
including "Tucker Carlson Tonight," have published e-mails taken from Hunter Biden's personal
laptop. They show that Hunter Biden was paid by foreign actors to change American foreign
policy using access to his father, then the vice president. This is a big story. It is also a
real story.
Friday afternoon, we received nonpublic information that proves conclusively this was indeed
Hunter Biden's laptop. There are materials on the hard drive of that computer that no one but
Hunter Biden could have known about or have replicated. This is not a Russian hoax. Again,
we're saying this definitively. We're not speculating. The laptop in question is real. It
belonged to Hunter Biden. So there is no excuse for not asking about it.
But they didn't ask about it. It was a cover-up in real time. No matter what happens in the
election next month, the American media will never be the same after this. It cannot continue
this way. It is too dishonest.
Nevertheless, we did learn a few things Thursday night. (It's hard not to learn when you
watch Joe Biden try to speak for 90 minutes.) At one point, an activist told Joe Biden that she
has an eight-year-old transgender daughter. She asked Joe Biden what he thought about that.
Here's how he responded:
BIDEN: The idea that an eight-year-old child or a 10-year-old child decides, 'You know,
I've decided I want to be transgender. That's what I think. I'd like to be a -- make my life a
lot easier.' There should be zero discrimination. What's happening is too many transgender
women of color are being murdered. They're being murdered. I mean, I think it's up to now 17,
don't hold me to that number.
So if an eight-year-old biological boy decides one day that he's really a girl, that's final
and you'd have to be a bigot to pause and say, "Wait a minute, you're eight years old, you're a
small child. Maybe let's think about this for a minute." That's what a normal person who has
kids would say. People with kids know that children grow and change. They change their minds
about a lot of things, including themselves. That's the reality of it.
But if you're a crazed ideologue, you don't care about reality. So you would tell the rest
of us that an eight-year-old is entitled to hormone therapy on demand and permanent,
life-altering surgery. That's what Biden is telling us.
It doesn't matter how fashionable talk like this is right now, and it is very fashionable,
it is crazy and it's destructive and it's having a profound effect. No one wants to say it, but
it's true. We know that between 2016 and 2017, the number of gender surgeries for biological
females in this country quadrupled. We also know that many people who get those surgeries
regret them later, deeply regret them. We'd have a lot more data on that, but universities are
actively punishing researchers who follow that line of inquiry. So much for science.
In the end, mania like this will end. The left is at war with nature. Inevitably, they will
lose that war, because nature always prevails. But in the meantime, many children are being
hurt irreparably. Biden doesn't care. It's the new thing, and so he's for it. In fact, Biden is
now busy rewriting his entire life story to pretend that he has been woke for 60 years.
Thursday night, he told us he became a gay rights supporter during the Kennedy administration,
sometime around 1962, when he and his father saw two gay men kissing.
When asked about police brutality, the former vice president speculated that maybe people
like George Floyd would be alive today if the police had just shot him in the leg a few
times.
BIDEN: There's a lot of things we've learned and it takes time. But we can do this. You
can ban chokeholds ... But beyond that, you have to teach people how to deescalate
circumstances, deescalate. So instead of anybody coming at you and the first thing you do shoot
to kill, shoot him in the leg.
How much would you have to know about firearms or human biology to wonder if maybe there
could be some unintended consequences there? People do have arteries in their legs, after all,
and sometimes bullets do miss their targets. So why did no one point out how demented Biden's
answer was?
Well, we have some clarity on the question of why no one pointed it out. It turns out George
Stephanopoulos, the moderator of last night's ABC town hall, was not the only political
operative in the room. One supposedly uncommitted voter was, in fact, a former Obama
administration speechwriter called Nathan Osburn. Osburn repeated Biden campaign talking points
to the letter, at one point referring to court-packing as a safeguard "that'll help ensure more
long-term balance and stability" on the Supreme Court.
BIDEN: I have not been a fan of court-packing because I think it just generates, what
will happen ... Whoever wins, it just keeps moving in a way that is inconsistent with what is
going to be manageable.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So you're still not a fan?
BIDEN: Well, I'm not a fan ... It depends on how this turns out, not how he wins, but how
it's handled, how it's handled. But there's a number of things that are going to be coming up
and there's going to be a lot of discussion about other alternatives as well.
So we did learn something new last night: Joe Biden isn't a fan of court-packing.
Court-packing has had a few off years, and Joe Biden started to lose his faith in it, even sold
his "Court-Packing" jersey. But at the end of the day, Joe Biden is still open to court-packing
and can get back on the court-packing bandwagon depending on how things are "handled." Got
it?
Biden was allowed to answer non-questions like this because he was surrounded by sycophants
and former employees of his party. Over at NBC, by contrast, the sitting president didn't have
that luxury, to put it mildly. (By the way, it's not good for you to be sucked up to too much.
It's good to get smacked around a little bit. It makes you sharper.)
During the president's one-hour event, moderator Savannah Guthrie asked him dozens more
questions than the voters in the room got to ask. And when Trump began speaking, Guthrie
interrupted him over and over again. Joe Biden wasn't there, so the moderator played stand-in
for Joe Biden.
The good news about all of this is it's so bad and so transparent that it can't continue.
All their stupid little morning shows and their dumb Sunday shows and their even dumber cable
shows -- all of that's going away when the smoke clears from this election. There will be a
massive realignment in the media no matter who wins, because they've showed who they are and
it's so unappealing, so far from journalism, that it can't continue.
Meanwhile, back on ABC, Joe Biden skated on answering any questions of substance about his
son or Antifa or BLM. On NBC, Guthrie pushed Donald Trump to condemn QAnon and White supremacy,
and he did it dutifully. But it wasn't enough. The point of demanding performative disavowals
isn't to get the disavowal, it's to smear the person you're asking to disavow the group by
association with the group.
GUTHRIE: You were asked point-blank to denounce White supremacy [at the first debate]. In
the moment, you didn't ... A couple of days later on a different show, you denounce White
supremacy --
TRUMP: You always do this. You've done this line -- I denounce White supremacy,
OK?
GUTHRIE: You did two days later.
TRUMP: I've denounced White supremacy for years. But you always do, you always start off
with the question. You didn't ask Joe Biden whether or not he denounces Antifa ... Are you
listening? I denounce White supremacy. What's your next question?
NBC was under a lot of pressure from Democrats to make Thursday night's town hall look like
this, and just like Facebook and Twitter delivered earlier this week, NBC delivered,
too.
whatmeworry? 1 day ago The only difference between the "news" media today, and, say a
decade ago, is that they no longer try to conceal their bias. They've dropped the cloak of
objectivity and come out as democrat activists. It's sort of refreshing. We no longer have to
waste time and energy arguing about the fairness of the media. Scotty2Hotty 1 1 day ago
Liberals are more an enemy of the free press than Donald Trump is--we know that for sure after
the NY Post incident. For all the times Trump has trashed the press, he has never shut them
down (he can't), but the liberals at Facebook and Twitter did just that to the New York Post,
because they didn't like a story of theirs. The story should never have been banned anywhere.
In a free society, bogus stories are debunked by other free speech outlets and press agencies.
They are not banned. Trump is not a friend of the press, but liberals are a worse enemy than he
is, to press freedom. Leftists have a strong totalitarian streak, and they continually work to
create environments where only one viewpoint is permitted, whether in academia, television, the
press or elsewhere. Liberals believe more in shutting down dissent than in discrediting it,
through argument. Gadsden_1968 2.0 1 day ago 90% of the media is now formally known as the
Democratic Party propaganda ministry. Arm yourselves, it appears the majority of people are
100% controlled by the Democratic Party's propaganda ministry. If Biden wins, his propaganda
ministry will make Pravda look like a high school news paper. Architech 1 day ago Why is the
crackhead Hunter Biden a taboo subject? Nobody mentions that Hunter is The Train Wreck of the
Century. Even on right wing news they don't tell you what a drop dead irresponsible loser low
life that Hunter is. He sleeps with his dying brothers wife while he is still alive. Red flag.
Plenty of other girls, but no, your sister in law. But that is nothing. Nada. Kicked out of the
Navy for drug use. Banged 1000 strippers in Wash DC, knocked one up, denied the child, was
proven he was the dad, denied child support and was forced to pay. Nice. Dead beat dad deluxe.
There are about 100 things like that. Too long to list. And nobody mentions is. They act like
Hunter is just another guy.... Calling out the Loser of the Century is not off limits in my
book. Calling out stupidity, no self control, no personal responsibility, corruption, unethical
behavior, outright crimes....not off limits. It's actually illegal to be a crack addict did you
know that?
"... "The whole point of the Intelligence Community since the end of World War II was that whatever propaganda the CIA produces, whatever disinformation campaigns they engaged were never supposed to be directed domestically," he said. "That was the point of the NSA, the CIA, and all those intelligence communities." ..."
"... "What we have seen since 2016 going back to the 2016 campaign is incessant involvement in U.S. domestic politics. Working with journalists to disseminate purely for partisan ends. If you want to talk about things like violating norms, and dangers to democracy, what's more dangerous than allowing the CIA constantly to be manipulating our politics by making cover for the Biden campaign by claiming anonymously that the Russians are behind the story and therefore you disregard it. Even if the Russians why does that alleviate the responsibility of journalists to evaluate the emails and to examine whether or not Joe Biden actually engaged in misconduct?" Greenwald asked. ..."
Glenn Greenwald appeared on Tucker Carlson's FOX News show Monday night to criticize
the media for its lack of response to the Hunter Biden laptop story. Greenwald also criticized
intel community activity in domestic elections and posed the question that even if Russians are
behind the story it just requires journalistic investigation in case Biden is compromised.
"Adam Schiff is seriously the most pathological liar in all of American politics that I've seen in all of my time covering
politics and journalism," Greenwald said on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.' "He just fabricates accusations at the drop of the hat at
the other people change underwear. He's simply lying when he just asserts over and over that the Russians or the Kremlin are
behind the story. He has no idea whether or not that is true. There is no evidence to support it."
"And what makes it so much worse is that the reason that the Bidens aren't answering basic
questions about the story," Greenwald said. "Basic questions like did Hunter Biden drop that
laptop off of the repair shop? Are the emails authentic? Do you know denied that they are. Do
you claim that any have been altered or are any of them fabricated? Did you in fact meet with
Barisma executives? The reason they don't answer the questions is because the media has
signaled that they don't have to. That journalists will be attacked and vilified simply for
asking."
Victor Davis Hanson: Will Our Next Revolution Be French, Russian, Maoist, Or
American?
Glenn Greenwald: Media and Intel Community Working Together To Manipulate The American
People
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"The whole point of the Intelligence Community since the end of World War II was that
whatever propaganda the CIA produces, whatever disinformation campaigns they engaged were never
supposed to be directed domestically," he said. "That was the point of the NSA, the CIA, and
all those intelligence communities."
"What we have seen since 2016 going back to the 2016 campaign is incessant involvement
in U.S. domestic politics. Working with journalists to disseminate purely for partisan ends. If
you want to talk about things like violating norms, and dangers to democracy, what's more
dangerous than allowing the CIA constantly to be manipulating our politics by making cover for
the Biden campaign by claiming anonymously that the Russians are behind the story and therefore
you disregard it. Even if the Russians why does that alleviate the responsibility of
journalists to evaluate the emails and to examine whether or not Joe Biden actually engaged in
misconduct?" Greenwald asked.
"The much bigger point is the way that the information is being disseminated," he said. "It
is a union of journalists who have decided that their only goal is to defend Joe Biden and
election him president of the United States working with the FBI, CIA, NSA not to manipulate
our adversaries or foreign governments, but to manipulate the American people for their own
ends. It's been going on for four straight years now and there's no sign of it stopping anytime
soon." Related Videos
It seems in our complicated world many murky relationships develop that come across as
inappropriate. Over the years, growing crony capitalism has become the bane of modern society
and added greatly to inequality. This is why, when we look at Hunter Biden and how he benefited
from his father's role as Vice President an investigation is in order. Even before we get to
what happened in Ukraine, the ties between China and the Biden family are too many and too
large to ignore. President Trump has received a lot of criticism related to how he gained his
wealth, however, almost all of what Trump has done he did as an outsider and not as part of the
ruling political class.
Before going deeper into this subject it is very important to look at how the "Biden
revelations" are being handled by the media. The way media has handled these allegations reveal
a flaw or bias in both mainstream media and social media to the point where even censorship is
being deployed. A good example of the spin being put on this red flag of corruption can be seen
in an article that appeared under trending stories on my city's main news outlet. Here in the
conservation heartland of America, the media published a piece titled; "Biden email episode
illustrates risk to Trump from Giuliani"
The Associated Press piece written by Eric Tucker shines the spotlight on Rudy Giuliani
portraying him as the messenger of Russian contrived information aimed at damaging Biden and
influencing the election. It starts off referring to "a New York tabloid's puzzling account
about how it acquired emails purportedly from Joe Biden's son has raised some red flags." Then
claims that during Giuliani's travels abroad looking for dirt on the Bidens he developed
relationships with some rather questionable figures. These include a Ukrainian lawmaker who
U.S. officials have described as a Russian agent and part of a broader Russian effort to
denigrate the Democratic presidential nominee.
The piece then moves on to the area of how the FBI seems more interested in the emails as
part of a foreign influence operation than wrongdoing by Hunter or his father. The people
reading this article are informed how this is just another latest episode involving Giuliani
that "underscores the risk he poses to the White House" which has spent years dealing with a
federal investigation into whether Trump associates had coordinated with Russia.
The part of the article that got my goat was when it referred to how " The Washington Post
reported Thursday that intelligence agencies had warned the White House last year that Giuliani
was the target of a Russian influence operation." Sighting the Washington Post as an authority
and bastion of truth is a common tactic used by journalists to add validity to their bias and
lazy reporting. Tucker forgot to mention The Washington Post is the propaganda mouthpiece of
Amazon and owned by its CEO Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world which has had several
run-ins with the President.
The effort to denigrate Giuliani rather than focus on Biden wrongdoings cites both "former
officials' and statements made by a person "who was not authorized to discuss an ongoing
investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity to AP," and of course, the exact scope of
what was being investigated was not clear. Claiming that many people in the West Wing have been
concerned about Giuliani's actions or saying the president has expressed private dismay at
Giuliani's scattershot style does not make it true.
Thinking a case can be made that Hunter enriched himself by selling access to his father but
claiming Giuliani's lack of credibility will cause the allegations to implode is a bit of a
reach. This fact much of what appears to be bribe-taking at the highest levels of government
has been overlooked for so long is in its self is a problem. The appointment of an unqualified
Hunter Biden to the board of a Ukrainian energy company with a reported compensation package
worth some $50,000 per month led the Wall Street Journal, to publish a scathing article, on May
13, 2014. bringing the issue before the public.
At criminal.findlaw.com, FindLaw's team of legal writers and editors detail what constitutes
bribery. It is offering or accepting anything of value in exchange to influence a
government/public official or employee. Bribes can take many forms of gifts or payments of
money in exchange for favorable treatment, such as awards of government contracts. Other forms
of bribes may include property, various goods, privileges, services, and favors. Bribes are
always intended to influence or alter the action of various individuals and are linked to both
political and public corruption. In most situations, both the person offering the bribe and the
person accepting can be charged.
Both giving and receiving bribes is usually a felony with significant legal ramifications.
Influence peddling, the illegal practice of using one's influence in government or connections
with persons in authority to obtain favors or preferential treatment falls into this category.
One thing is clear, whenever we are talking about the involvement of huge sums of money,
foreign players, officials holding high public office, or family members of politicians a few
eyebrows should get raised. With this in mind, the Biden problem extends well past Hunter but
also into how other family members have profited from Joe's time as Vice President such as his
brother's involvement in a huge government contract in Iraq.
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The issue of Hunter Biden receiving money from Russia, Ukraine, and China surfaced during
the first Presidential debate and Biden claimed it was a story already discredited by
authorities. This narrative was destroyed when the Washington Times acknowledged the Treasury
Department records confirm Hunter Biden received a wire transfer for $3.5 million from the
Mayor of Moscow's wife. It is difficult to find anyone that holds Hunter in high esteem and the
fact the United States suspects the woman sending him this money built much of her wealth
through corruption does little to improve his standing. For those of us cynical of all the
so-called public servants that seem to line their pockets and hold the attitude they are above
the law this is a big red flag.
If the veil of secrecy surrounding Hunter's career is lifted we will most likely find
Hunter's dad did share in the spoils bestowed upon not only his son but others in the Biden
family. I contend Joe Biden's cozy relationship with corruption is why former President Obama
did not rush to endorse Biden when he announced he planned to run. To be clear, we are talking
about, millions, and hundreds of millions of dollars or more. For us cynics, we see this as
what may be only the tip of the spear when it comes to public officials throwing the American
people under the bus for fun and profit. As a voter, this dovetails with my concern about
Biden's relationship and attitude towards China which I consider a major issue.
Jan_Michael_Vincent007 , 4 hours ago
The [neoliberal] political class is the problem. ******* all of them. Biden just got
caught.
Jan_Michael_Vincent007 , 4 hours ago
The political class is the problem. ******* all of them. Biden just got caught.
RedDog1 , 4 hours ago
Highly recommend reading Peter Schweitzer's book Secret Empires. It's business as usual to
launder bribes through family members and associates.
philipat , 2 hours ago
Yes agreed, the problem here is actually that the entire US political (and economic)
system is completely corrupt and broken. Why has no action been taken against those
responsible for a proven attempted coup? Or against a MSM and SillyCon Valley that is
censoring everything the average American (rightlly or wrongly) actually reads and which is
stifling the very democracy and free speech upon which the country was founded?
The answer? Follow the money.
I do disagree with the author about the specific Biden situation because "The Biden Crime
Family" would be a better description. They are ALL responsible. It is obvious from the
Hunter laptop that payments were being made to "The Big Man" and other family members also,
so this is NOT a Hunter-specific problem. The game was for Hunter to serve as a proxy for
"The Big Man" and receive the "commissions" (better described as influence peddling payments
and extortion - something the Dems are very good at; The Clinton Foundation Model!!) for
onward distribution to the family, visibly or invisibly. In this way, "The Big Man" would not
have anything to report and could appear to be "clean". Pretty obvious to anyone who can fog
a mirror?
And yet still they vote for him. Does that mean a public acceptance of the sleaze and
corruption which is the US today? I certainly hope not.
Rural Hermit , 2 hours ago
Why do you think Obama picked Biden to be his VP? He knows how to shakedown everyone.
Obama's tutor. I do think that the student has surpassed the teacher though. When the rest of
this shakes out, the Kenyan will be in chains.
gregga777 , 3 hours ago
If the truth ever comes out, it will probably show that, among other things, Hunter Biden
was / is probably connected to human trafficking networks, and most likely Eastern European,
most likely involving The Russian Mafia. It's not a stretch to speculate that it also
included children.
If the United States of America had a functioning [sic] Intelligence Community and [Ha,
ha, ha] national law enforcement the Silicon Valley tech giants and others like Amazon
wouldn't be heavily infiltrated by People's Republic of China Ministry of State Security
operatives. Consequently, the massive extent of political corruption would be common
knowledge, especially specifics regarding names, dates, places and amounts. Right Paul Ryan
and Willard Romney?
Rusty Shorts , 3 hours ago
The hits just keep coming.
"Pelosi's Son Now Involved In Ukraine Scandal, Democrat Party In Shambles"
Seriously, does anyone think a Democrat controlled Congress will investigate Biden and all
his cronies, to include Obama? The whole DC swamp is set up to allow selling out of the
American people. DC is not just a threat to national security it is steeped in Treason.
No sense ranting as it does nothing. The only consolation is that stupid people who vote
Biden/Harris will get the crime and corruption they voted into office.
Stackers , 4 hours ago
In Roman times when someone was caught bribing a public official they would cut off his
nose, sew him in a bag with a wild animal, and throw that bag in the river
The problem with all this is that it is extremely well documented going back a number of
years of Hunter Jnr's shopping trips with his father and nothing has been done about it all.
Just search on Biden and China, Romania or Ukraine and then you see the "deals" that Hunter
gets every time.
Every f\/cking place that Biden turned up, Hunter was right behind with his hand out, like
some sort of mob shakedown. Did Biden senior tell Hunter what to do and who to meet because
junior doesn't seem that clever enough to come up with this on his own? That way, the money
also flows to junior who then funnels it to dad later on (which the laptop seems to
show).
Washington insiders know the f\/cking truth and are desperate to keep the gravy train
going. That is why they hate Trump. That is why Barr and co have no interest in getting to
the truth because they are all implicated. The swamp is very deep.
Merica101 , 4 hours ago
Human nature is swampy - that's why the Founding Fathers tried to design a system that
limited the "swampiness'. Unfortunately, they couldn't even begin to imagine the depravity
and games that are now being played. Pray.
Fuster-cluck , 3 hours ago
I have worked for a number of large multi-national corporations. In each, employees must
take an annual ethics course. The only approved amount you can spend on a client is $0. I
mean, no golf, no lunches, no tee shirts, no hunting weekends, zippo, nothing. If anyone in
your family is connected to government, it is automatically assumed to be a conflict of
interest, and you must remove yourself from any part of the dealings. These policies have
been implemented because of the intense fear of the unlimited penalties that may be applied
by goverment sponsored prosecutorial abuse.
So tell me, have those same standards been applied here? Ha. Ha. Ha.
Smilygladhands , 3 hours ago
i think we must implement a no fraternization rule between DC politicians and staff and
the media. too many personal relationships going on up there
TahoeBilly2012 , 3 hours ago
Tards have finally been caught out, no way back.
Look man, I never would have voted for HILLARY OR JEB, no f'ing way! I am a Ron Paul
Libertarian and I rolled the dice with Trump.
You Tards are all a gang of freaks. The fact you even halfway support Biden (or Hillary)
is pathetic. The only way you get change is sticking to your guns or having a Trump come
along and hope he is for the people and not a Satanic criminal, like the Biden's, the Bush's
and the Clinton's. What exactly is it that you freaks don't get and while Bernie may have
been somewhat more "authentic" than the rest, he's a friggin Bolshevik Commy, in his own way,
worse than them all, likely not as corrupt.
There's nothing left to the Dem Party, zero, zilch, it's a stinking rotting corpse relying
on Corporate Media lie after lie to try to compete with Trump. Hell, every Neocon has left
Trump and joined up with y'all. Geez, the stench!
Pathetic, disgusting, sick.
Lucius Septimius Pertinax , 3 hours ago
What bothers me about all this is the reaction of Democrats in general. They don't seem to
care what the Biden's have done, as long as they defeat Donald Trump. We seen this on a
smaller scale with the impeachment of Bill Clinton, it's all about sex manta. But in this
case we have what appears to be at least for now, almost a watertight case against Joe Biden.
And still no moral outrage at what Biden's family is up to? Guess I should not have been
amazed, but still hope their are a few thinkers left on the left that can still see the truth
when it bites them.
I expected the CNN's of the left to react this way. Further when their "the Russians"
excuse for everything, is exhausted, they will need someone else to blame, cause they know
Biden and son are as pure as the driven snow. Or at least the owners of all these so called
media news companies decide that Joe cannot win and flush the comode on him.
sirnzee , 3 hours ago
The media has done a terrific job of brainwashing half of America. So sad to be a part of
this. Who is to blame? The media, or the people who allowed their minds to be controlled the
way they are?
Fugly
Merica101 , 3 hours ago
Most of the MSM have their own agenda - a globalist agenda where the US is not their
priority.
12Doberman , 4 hours ago
Some deny the Biden's got the money which is absurd since the Senate report details the
wire transfers. Denial of facts seems to be a democrat trait.
chiquita , 3 hours ago
This is the Democrat philosophy--one of the best movie scenes ever.
Biden has used his family as bag men for graft since he was shaking down banks that
incorporated in Delaware for tax purposes.
He was MBNA Joe long before he became dementia Joe.
Totally vile corrupt dullard on his best day.
That is why the DNC wants him.
CogitoMan , 3 hours ago
Any person who has knowledge of Biden family crimes and still votes for him is beyond
deplorable.
Even demonrats that hate Trump IF they have at least minimum token of decency should
abstain from voting.
But alas, most of dumbocrats will vote for Biden even if he raped their daughters and shot
their wives.
This country with such moral attitude has no chance of survival, especially when tough
times come.
Sad, very sad.
12Doberman , 3 hours ago
Trump learned quickly that without powerful allies in powerful positions in the executive
agencies, within congress, and in the courts he's essentially powerless against this
corruption. Pelosi is involved in Ukraine...McConnell is up to his eyeballs in Chinese
graft.
Md4 , 4 hours ago
"Hunter Biden Is Not The Problem, The Problem Is His Dad"
Pops has been demonstrably crooked for years.
But... Hunter is not a child.
He's a grown man... with a law degree.
His problems are now...his own.
He can begin to recover...when he accepts responsibility for them...
Hotspice2020 , 4 hours ago
Stop treating mainstream media as "independent, objective, unbiased" they are "captured
media", and vassal servants to a hidden hand ruling elite ... as are the Bidens and K.
Harris. The Clintons were vassals before as was slamma Obama. The media will say whatever
their master tell them to say. Thus, when a Hard Drive with pedo, crack, bribery is found,
the masters say...blame it on the Russians. When Trump wants to bring Hunters double dealing
to light...the masters say.. Impeach Trump. What is needed is for a bright light to shine on
the owners of the media...e.g., Bezos Rag (Wash. Post) and Laurene Powell Jobs (mistress to
Steve) owns the Atlantic. Once you keep focusing on the fact that the media has owners that
make every story fit their narrative and you shine a light on them, then you can solve the
problem.
tyberious , 5 hours ago
Term limits
Full income disclosures while in office
No benefit for any legislation co-authored after leaving office
zerozerosevenhedgeBow1 , 4 hours ago
No honor, integrity or honesty in politics anymore. Why would there be any, when apart for
a little public shaming, corruption pays and pays big. The Clinton foundation raked in
hundreds of millions, altered policy and maybe even caused death of the impoverished, i.e.,
Haiti and other places. Sold out national and global security with Uranium One and other
controversies. The end result?... They got to keep all the money. When that happens, everyone
in and running for office gets the message and sees dollar signs.
You need serious recourse like some sort of treason charges when you put money over
country. Audit all family members and colleagues. Then do not let lobbying jobs before or
after office.
moneybots , 3 hours ago
"The Associated Press piece written by Eric Tucker shines the spotlight on Rudy Giuliani
portraying him as the messenger of Russian contrived information aimed at damaging Biden and
influencing the election. It starts off referring to "a New York tabloid's puzzling account
about how it acquired emails purportedly from Joe Biden's son has raised some red
flags.""
Yes, it raises Red Flags about the integrity of the Associated Press, considering the
story is a propaganda piece.
Merica101 , 4 hours ago
Joe and Hunter Biden (and the Biden family) aren't the ONLY ONES....there are many
others.
toady , 4 hours ago
The questions that simply are not being asked/answered....
I have not heard that any Biden has been asked about any of this... apparently they
thought they could just have CNN and the other talking heads say it was all "debunked" and
the brain dead general population would nod and say "okay".
And they were right, the demonrats are all just doing the Alfred E Numan "who, me,
worry?"
It's simple. The "17 intelligence agencies" need to be all over this, starting 15 years
ago.
But they aren't. And they won't. And the US will not recover.
TheLastMan , 3 hours ago
perspective:
1. you work 50 hours a week
2. .gov takes 22% for income tax
3. joe biden (and the rest) take your tax $$$ and provides $$$ foreign aid to country
X
4. hunter biden makes business connection to country x
5. country x takes your foreign aid tax dollars (edit) and pays hunter biden $$ for his
services
6. hunter biden pays joe biden $$ for (his service to your country) edit - servicing your
country
7. repeat step 1
Smilygladhands , 3 hours ago
the biggest problem that must be addressed is our dishonest, biased DNC propaganda arm
also known as main stream media.
they've allowed biden to get away with not answering the SCOTUS packing question and now
actively running cover for him. we cannot allow this to continue
Md4 , 4 hours ago
" Both giving and receiving bribes is usually a felony with significant legal
ramifications. Influence peddling, the illegal practice of using one's influence in
government or connections with persons in authority to obtain favors or preferential
treatment falls into this category."
When it involves a mortal adversary... we call it something else...
HailAtlantis , 4 hours ago
Always lots of fun this time of year taking Anti-Money Laundering etc continuing education
courses and reading about high level scandals in finance and governments in current news
(it's just gotten progressively more insidious every year).. Scrutinizing little 'guys' while
making billions at the top.
johnny two shoes , 2 hours ago
Can't forget old Swiftboat Kerry...
At the time, Hunter Biden, now 49, and Christopher Heinz, the stepson of then-Secretary of
State John Kerry, co-owned Rosemont Seneca Partners, a $2.4 billion private equity firm.
Heinz's college roommate, Devon Archer, was managing partner in the firm. In the spring of
2014, Biden and Archer joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company that was
at the center of a U.K. money laundering probe. Over the next year, Burisma reportedly paid
Biden and Archer's companies over $3 million.
Electing a President is electing someone in formal command of enough power to kill most of
the people on the planet - perhaps three times over. Including you and me. This is not the
mayor of Minneapolis we're talking about.
vasilievich , 4 hours ago
To use biologists' terminology the species may not be adaptive. To be clever at graft does
*not* assure survival in the long run. It may assure extinction.
12Doberman , 4 hours ago
Biden wasn't clever. Hillary was a bit clever using a Foundation and a 'charity' to
launder her graft. Cost her 15% or so but she had the facade of the charity. Biden put his
crackhead son in charge of laundering the graft...needless to say it was careless in the
extreme...and the DNC knew all about this before they selected Biden. Stunning level of
arrogance.
chiquita , 4 hours ago
Nobody ever said Biden was a smart guy. He knew how to plagerize as in words (speeches),
but he didn't know how to copy as in ideas (charitable foundations)
SurfingUSA , 4 hours ago
Per someone on this forum who has met Biden, he is stupid not just by politician standards
but by everyday people standards.
coelacanth10 , 3 hours ago
Bill gets credit for using the Foundation, base on a undergraduate course at Georgetown on
non-profits and foundations.
chiquita , 4 hours ago
Obama had to know what was going on, if not a party to it. There was a clear distance
between the two of them--Obama did not show a great love for Biden and you have to wonder
what that was all about. He tried to tell Joe "he didn't have to do it" relative to running,
which leaves a lot open to interpretation. Trump keeps saying that Biden was not a bright guy
and that's pretty obvious in a lot of Biden's stories and his overall history. Obama knew
Biden wasn't the smartest guy too. Was Obama trying to tell Joe to leave well enough alone
and not run for the presidency, which would surely expose all this stuff? There was a good
chance Biden wasn't going to get this far, but now see what has happened. You have to wonder
what is at play with this--why didn't they shut Biden down before it got this far?
Fight it all you want, but there's nothing you can do. "The emails are Russian" is going to
be the official dominant narrative in mainstream political discourse, and there's nothing you
can do to stop it. Resistance is futile.
Like the Russian hacking narrative, the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, the Russian
bounties in Afghanistan narrative, and any other evidence-free framing of events that
simultaneously advances pre-planned cold war agendas, is politically convenient for the
Democratic party and generates clicks and ratings, the narrative that the New York Post
publication of Hunter Biden's emails is a Russian operation is going to be hammered and
hammered and hammered until it becomes the mainstream consensus. This will happen regardless of
facts and evidence, up to and including rock solid evidence that Hunter Biden's emails were not
published as a result of a Russian operation.
This is happening. It's following the same formula all the other fact-free Russia hysteria
narratives have followed. The same media tour by pundits and political operatives saying with
no evidence but very assertive voices that Russia is most certainly behind this occurrence and
we should all be very upset about it.
"To me, this is just classic textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft at work," Russiagate founder
and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is heard assuring CNN's audience .
"Joe Biden – and all of us – SHOULD be furious that media outlets are spreading
what is very likely Russian propaganda," begins and eight-part thread by Democratic Senator
Chris Murphy, who claims the emails are "Kremlin constructed anti-Biden propaganda."
"It's not really surprising at all, this was always the play, but still kind of
head-spinning to watch all the players from 2016 run exactly the same hack-leak-smear op in
2020. Even with everyone knowing exactly what's happening this time," tweets MSNBC's Chris
Hayes.
"How are you all circling the wagons instead of being embarrassed for peddling Russian ops
18 days before the election. It's not enough that you all haven't learned from your atrocious
handling of 2016 -- you are doubling down," Democratic Party think tanker Neera Tanden
tweeted in admonishment of
journalists who dare to report on or ask questions about the emails.
Virtually the entirety of the Democratic Party-aligned political/media class has streamlined
this narrative of Russian influence into the American consciousness with very little inertia,
despite the fact that neither Joe nor Hunter Biden has disputed the authenticity of the emails
and despite a complete absence of evidence for Russian involvement in their publication.
This is surely the first time, at least in recent memory, that we have ever seen such a
broad consensus within the mass media that it is the civic duty of news reporters to try and
influence the outcome of a presidential general election by withholding negative news coverage
for one candidate. There was a lot of fascinated hatred for Trump in 2016, but people still
reported on Hillary Clinton's various scandals and didn't attack one another for doing so. In
2020 that has changed, and mainstream news reporters have now largely coalesced along the
doctrine that they must avoid any reporting which might be detrimental to the Biden
campaign.
"Dem Party hacks (and many of their media allies) genuinely believe it's immoral to report
on or even discuss stories that reflect poorly on Biden. In reality, it's the responsibility of
journalists to ignore their vapid whining and ask about newsworthy stories, even about Biden,"
tweeted The Intercept 's Glenn
Greenwald recently.
"You don't even have to think the Hunter Biden materials constitute some kind of
earth-shattering story to be absolutely repulsed at the authoritarian propaganda offensive
being waged to discredit them -- primarily by journalists who behave like compliant little
trained robots ," tweeted journalist Michael
Tracey.
Last month The Spectator 's Stephen L Miller described how the consensus
formed among the mainstream press since Clinton's 2016 loss that it is their moral duty to
be uncritical of Trump's opponent.
"For almost four years now, journalists have shamed their colleagues and themselves over
what I will call the 'but her emails' dilemma," Miller writes. "Those who reported dutifully on
the ill-timed federal investigation into Hillary Clinton's private server and spillage of
classified information have been cast out and shunted away from the journalist cool kids'
table. Focusing so much on what was, at the time, a considerable scandal, has been written off
by many in the media as a blunder. They believe their friends and colleagues helped put Trump
in the White House by focusing on a nothing-burger of a Clinton scandal when they should have
been highlighting Trump's foibles. It's an error no journalist wants to repeat."
So "the emails are Russian" narrative serves the interests of political convenience,
partisan media ratings, and the national security state's pre-planned agenda to continue
escalating against Russia as part of its
slow motion third world war against nations which refuse to bow to US dictates, and you've
got essentially no critical mainstream news coverage putting the brakes on any of it. This
means this narrative is going to become mainstream orthodoxy and treated as an established
fact, despite the fact that there is no actual, tangible evidence for it.
Joe Biden could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and the mainstream
press would crucify any journalist who so much as tweeted about it. Very
little journalism is going into vetting and challenging him, and a great deal of the energy
that would normally be doing so is going into ensuring that he slides right into the White
House.
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If the mainstream news really existed to tell you the truth about what's going on, everyone
would know about every questionable decision that Joe Biden has ever made, Russiagate would
never have happened, we'd all be acutely aware of the fact that powerful forces are pushing us
into increasingly aggressive confrontations with two nuclear-armed nations, and Trump would be
grilled about
Yemen in every press conference.
But the mainstream news does not exist to tell you the truth about the world. The mainstream
news exists to advance the interests of its wealthy owners and the status quo upon which they
have built their kingdoms. That's why it's
so very, very important that we find ways to break away from it and share information with
each other that isn't tainted by corrupt and powerful interests.
* * *
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"... The neocon/NATO aggressive expansionism has many purposes, but one is surely domestic repression: to gaslight and cause fear-the-foreign-bogeyman trauma among the American and British people as a whole and make most of them become docile and lose their critical thinking skills and their ability to analyze their own societies. ..."
"... One of the best ways to lobotomize the publics of the US and UK is to very gradually impose martial law in the name of protecting national security and ensuring peace and harmony at home. ..."
The neocon/NATO aggressive expansionism has many purposes, but one is surely domestic
repression: to gaslight and cause fear-the-foreign-bogeyman trauma among the American and
British people as a whole and make most of them become docile and lose their critical
thinking skills and their ability to analyze their own societies.
One of the best ways to lobotomize the publics of the US and UK is to very gradually
impose martial law in the name of protecting national security and ensuring peace and harmony
at home.
After several color revolutions succeeded, the Russiagate/Spygate op was carried out in
the US, with British assistance. This op has been largely successful, though there has been
limited resistance against its whole fake edifice as well as with the logic of Cold War2.0.
Nevertheless, Spygate has shocked many tens of millions of Dems into a stupor, while millions
more are dazed and manipulated by the Chinese bogeyman being manufactured by Trump.
The most dangerous result of the martial law lite mentality caused by Spygate and its MSM
purveyors is the growing support for censorship of free speech coming mostly from the Dems,
such as Schiff and Warner. The danger inherent in this trend became very clear when FaceBook
and Twitter engaged in massive and unprecedented arbitrary censorship of the New York Post
and of various Trump-related accounts.
This is the kind of thing you do during Stage 1 of a coup. Surely it was at least in part
an experiment to see how various power points in the US would respond. Even though Twitter
ended the censorship later, it was probably a successful experiment designed to gauge
reactions and areas of resistance.
In November, there could be further, more serious experiments/ops. If so, the current
expansionist movements being made and planned by the US and NATO may well be integral parts
of a new non-democratic model of "American-style democracy" -- not constitution-based but
"rules-based."
Esper's speech demonstrates a confluence of policies, ideas, and funds that permeate
through the system, and are by no means unique to a single service, think tank, or
contractor.
First, Esper consistently situated his future expansion plans in a need to adapt to "an
era of great power competition." CNAS is one of the think tanks leading the charge in
highlighting the threat from Beijing.
They also received at least $8,946,000 from 2014-2019 from the U.S. government and
defense contractors, including over $7 million from defense contractors like Northrop
Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Huntington Ingalls, General Dynamics, and Boeing who would stand
to make billions if the 500-ship fleet were enacted.
It's all about the money. Foreign and domestic policy is always all about the money,
either directly or indirectly. Of course, the ultimate goal is power - or more precisely, the
ultimate goal is relief of the fear of death, which drives every single human's every action,
and only power can do that, and in this world only money can give you power (or so the
chimpanzees believe.)
Debunking 'fattest lie in modern political history' (Full show) 14 Oct, 2020 23:31 16
Follow RT on
Newly declassified documents continue to demolish "Russiagate," the discredited conspiracy
theory that US President Trump "colluded" with Russia to win the 2016 election. The documents
show how circular reporting, unverified gossip and conflicts of interest all worked to create
the years-long "Russiagate" frenzy. RT America's Alex Mihailovich has the details. Then former
UK MP George Galloway joins Rick Sanchez to share his analysis.
US Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett faces her final day of questions before US
senators on Wednesday. RT America's Faran Fronczak has the details. Twitter has unveiled a new
set of policies to try to stem misinformation from spreading on its platform during the 2020 US
presidential election. RT America's John Huddy has the details. The legal and media analyst
Lionel of Lionel Media and conservative commentator Steve Malzberg weigh in. Plus, RT America's
Natasha Sweatte reports on NASA's search for "super-habitable" planets outside the Solar
System.
It appears the "Russia, Russia, Russia" cries from Adam Schiff and his dutiful media peons
is dead (we can only hope) as Director of National Intel John Ratcliffe just confirmed to Foxx
Business' Maria Bartiromo that:
"Hunter Biden's laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign."
As Politico's Quint Forgey details
(@QuintForgey) , DNI Ratcliffe is asked directly whether accusations leveled against the
Bidens in recent days are part of a Russian disinformation effort.
He says no:
"Let me be clear. The intelligence community doesn't believe that because there is no
intelligence that supports that."
" We have shared no intelligence with Chairman Schiff or any other member of Congress that
Hunter Biden's laptop is part of some Russian disinformation campaign. It's simply not true.
"
"And this is exactly what I said would I stop when I became the director of national
intelligence, and that's people using the intelligence community to leverage some political
narrative."
"And in this case, apparently Chairman Schiff wants anything against his preferred
political candidate to be deemed as not real and as using the intelligence community or
attempting to use the intelligence community to say there's nothing to see here."
"Don't drag the intelligence community into this. Hunter Biden's laptop is not part of
some Russian disinformation campaign. And I think it's clear that the American people know
that."
So "the emails are Russian" narrative serves the interests of political convenience,
partisan media ratings, and the national security state's pre-planned agenda to continue
escalating against Russia as part of its
slow motion third world war against nations which refuse to bow to US dictates, and
you've got essentially no critical mainstream news coverage putting the brakes on any of it.
This means this narrative is going to become mainstream orthodoxy and treated as an
established fact, despite the fact that there is no actual, tangible evidence for it.
Joe Biden could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and the mainstream
press would crucify any journalist who so much as tweeted about it. Very
little journalism is going into vetting and challenging him, and a great deal of the
energy that would normally be doing so is going into ensuring that he slides right into the
White House.
If the mainstream news really existed to tell you the truth about what's going on,
everyone would know about every questionable decision that Joe Biden has ever made,
Russiagate would never have happened, we'd all be acutely aware of the fact that powerful
forces are pushing us into increasingly aggressive confrontations with two nuclear-armed
nations, and Trump would be grilled about
Yemen in every press conference.
But the mainstream news does not exist to tell you the truth about the world. The
mainstream news exists to advance the interests of its wealthy owners and the status quo upon
which they have built their kingdoms. That's why it's
so very, very important that we find ways to break away from it and share information
with each other that isn't tainted by corrupt and powerful interests.
As we detailed previously, as the Hunter Biden laptop scandal threatens to throw the 2020
election into chaos with what appears to be solid, undisputed evidence of high-level corruption
by former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, the same crowd which peddled the
Trump-Russia hoax is now suggesting that Russia is behind it all .
To wit, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who swore on National television
that he had evidence Trump was colluding with Russia - now says that President Trump is handing
the Kremlin a "propaganda coup from Vladimir Putin."
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) has gone full tin-foil , suggesting that Giuliani was a 'key
target' of 'Kremlin constructed anti-Biden propaganda.'
2/ Russia knew it had to play a different game than 2016. So it built an operation to cull
virulently pro-Trump Americans as pseudo-assets, so blind in their allegiance to Trump that
they'll willingly launder Kremlin constructed anti-Biden propaganda.
Yet, if one looks at the actual facts of the case - in particular, that Hunter Biden appears
to have dropped his own laptops off at a computer repair shop, signed a service ticket , and
the shop owner approached the FBI first and Rudy Giuliani last after Biden failed to pick them
up, the left's latest Russia conspiracy theory is quickly debunked .
This is the story of an American patriot, an honorable man, John Paul Mac Issac, who tried
to do the right thing and is now being unfairly and maliciously slandered as an agent of
foreign intelligence, specifically Russia. He is not an agent or spy for anyone. He is his own
man. How do I know? I have known his dad for more than 20 years. I've known John Paul's dad as
Mac. Mac is a decorated Vietnam Veteran, who flew gunships in Vietnam. And he continued his
military service with an impeccable record until he retired as an Air Force Colonel. The crews
of those gunships have an annual reunion and Mac usually takes John Paul along, who volunteers
his computer and video skills to record and compile the stories of those brave men who served
their country in a difficult war.
This story is very simple – Hunter Biden dropped off three computers with liquid
damage at a repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware on April 12, 2019. The owner, John Mac Issac,
examined the three and determined that one was beyond recovery, one was okay and the data on
the harddrive of the third could be recovered. Hunter signed the service ticket and John Paul
Mac Issac repaired the hard drive and down loaded the data . During this process he saw some
disturbing images and a number of emails that concerned Ukraine, Burisma, China and other
issues . With the work completed, Mr. Mac Issac prepared an invoice, sent it to Hunter Biden
and notified him that the computer was ready to be retrieved. H unter did not respond . In the
ensuing four months (May, June, July and August), Mr. Mac Issac made repeated efforts to
contact Hunter Biden. Biden never answered and never responded. More importantly, Biden stiffed
John Paul Mac Issac–i.e., he did not pay the bill.
When the manufactured Ukraine crisis surfaced in August 2019, John Paul realized he was
sitting on radioactive material that might be relevant to the investigation. After conferring
with his father, Mac and John Paul decided that Mac would take the information to the FBI
office in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Mac walked into the Albuquerque FBI office and spoke with an
agent who refused to give his name. Mac explained the material he had, but was rebuffed by the
FBI. He was told basically, get lost . This was mid-September 2019.
Two months passed and then, out of the blue, the FBI contacted John Paul Mac Issac. Two FBI
agents from the Wilmington FBI office–Joshua Williams and Mike Dzielak–came to John
Paul's business . He offered immediately to give them the hard drive, no strings attached.
Agents Williams and Dzielak declined to take the device .
Two weeks later, the intrepid agents called and asked to come and image the hard drive. John
Paul agreed but, instead of taking the hard drive or imaging the drive, they gave him a
subpoena. It was part of a grand jury proceeding but neither agent said anything about the
purpose of the grand jury. John Paul complied with the subpoena and turned over the hard drive
and the computer.
In the ensuing months, starting with the impeachment trial of President Trump, he heard
nothing from the FBI and knew that none of the evidence from the hard drive had been shared
with President Trump's defense team.
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The lack of action and communication with the FBI led John Paul to make the fateful decision
to contact Rudy Giuliani's office and offer a copy of the drive to the former mayor. We now
know that Rudy accepted John Paul's offer and that Rudy's team shared the information with the
New York Post.
John Paul Mac Issac is not responsible for the emails, images and videos recovered from
Hunter Biden's computer. He was hired to do a job, he did the job and submitted an invoice for
the work. Hunter Biden, for some unexplained reason, never responded and never asked for the
computer. But that changed last Tuesday, October 13, 2020. A person claiming to be Hunter
Biden's lawyer called John Paul Mac Issac and asked for the computer to be returned. Too late.
That horse had left the barn and was with the FBI.
John Paul, acting under Delaware law, understood that Hunter's computer became the property
of his business 90 days after it had been abandoned.
At no time did John Paul approach any media outlet or tabloid offering to sell salacious
material . A person of lesser character might have tried to profit. But that is not the essence
of John Paul Mac Issac. He had information in his possession that he learned, thanks to events
subsequent to receiving the computer for a repair job, was relevant to the security of our
nation. He did what any clear thinking American would do–he, through his father,
contacted the FBI. When the FBI finally responded to his call for help, John cooperated fully
and turned over all material requested .
The failure here is not John Paul's . He did his job. The FBI dropped the ball and, by
extension, the Department of Justice. Sadly, this is becoming a disturbing, repeating
theme–the FBI through incompetence or malfeasance is not doing its job.
Any news outlet that is publishing the damnable lie that John Paul is part of some
subversive effort to interfere in the United States Presidential election is on notice. That is
slander and defamation. Fortunately, the evidence from Hunter Biden's computer is in the hands
of the FBI and Rudy Giuliani and, I suspect, the U.S. Senate. Those with the power to do
something must act. John Paul Mac Issac's honor is intact. We cannot say the same for those
government officials who have a duty to deal with this information.
This is not leftist coup. This is intelligence agencies coup. Big difference. And Obama who
is the most probably mastermind and coordinator is as far from leftist as one can get, he is a
typical neoliberal with neocon inclinations, servant of the USA empire with probably some
delusions of American exeptionalism.
The statement " On August 18, 1991, with Mikhail Gorbachev preparing to sign a treaty that
would have decentralized the Soviet Union, his hardline political opponents in the Soviet
leadership arrested the father of perestroika at his Crimean dacha, proclaiming that the
Soviet State Committee on the State of Emergency was in charge." is naive and is not supported by
the facts. Gorbachov probably organized this coup to give himself a chance to get back control of
the country that was spinning out of his control. He failed and that was the end of his political
career of a sleazy second rate politician.
Our country seems headed for a political crisis, with the enemies of Deplorable America
making noises suggesting they are
planning a post-election "
Color Revolution "-type coup against Trump. As a long-time Russia-watcher,
I suggest that the failed Soviet coup of 1991, and the collapse
that it spurred on, is instructive.
The Soviet State Committee on the State of Emergency,
August, 1991
The key point that year came when Soviet military and security units refused to move against
Boris Yeltsin and his defenders. Could something like that happen here, with Trump playing the
Yeltsin role?
Meanwhile, the Democrats, with help from rabid Never Trumpers like Bill Kristol and
David Frum, have been " wargaming
" scenarios for preventing Trump from taking office should he win, developing a
plan for what Trump has correctly described as "an insurrection." [ The
Billionaire Backers of the 'Insurrection' , by Julie Kelly, AmGreatness.com, Sep 14, 2020]
The plan is to claim that Trump has stolen, or attempted to steal, the election. "As far as our
enemies are concerned," as I wrote here last month, "they are on the right side of history, and
neither election law nor the Constitution or any antiquated notions about fair play will stop
them." [
Revolution and Resistance: How can elections continue? , American Remnant, September 4,
2020]
The mail-in balloting plan plays into the Blob's wargaming. If the Democrats can't swing the
election their way by hook or crook, then the lengthy
process of
accounting for all the mail-in ballots could be used as a means to sow confusion and chaos,
giving them room to maneuver in the aftermath of Election Day.
The Blob's minions have been signaling their intention to drag out the vote count. Michigan
Governor
Gretchen Whitmer , for example, declared on Face the Nation that her state would not be
held to any "artificial deadlines" for reporting election results. [
MI Gov. Whitmer: No 'Artificial Deadlines' for Announcing Election Results , by Jeff
Poor, Breitbart, October 11, 2020] In an example of the psychological projection characteristic
of Democrats, Whitmer further claimed that those who might want to expedite the vote count had
"political agendas."
Meanwhile, the Blob's militant wing has been circulating a plan for post-election
disruption. [
READ: Left-wing Radicals Post Online Guide to 'Disrupting' the Country if Election is Close
, by Joel Pollak, Breitbart, October 12, 2020] A Leftist group calling itself ShutDownDC [ Tweet them ] plans to prevent a Trump "coup" -- more
projection
there -- by shutting down the country and forcing Trump out if the vote is too close to call.
The
plan calls for "sustained disruptive movements all over the country." The militants also
state that they intend to demand that "no winner be announced until every vote is counted."
ShutDownDC further proclaims that it has no intention of allowing the country to return to
normal. The goal is to "dismantle" what it calls "interlocking systems of oppression."
In the chaos that appears increasingly likely after Election Day, we may not even have a
clear idea of what happened–-and, indeed, that may be part of the Blob's design.
In a recent segment on "Critical Race Theory" gaining traction at the Pentagon, Tucker
Carlson wondered just why the Left was so intent on capturing the military.
My answer: the Blob was contemplating the possibility of using the military as part of an
attempt to block a second Trump term.
It's quite clear that the top military brass has been subject to "the Great Awokening"
and Trump Derangement Syndrome as much as the rest of the federal bureaucracy. The military
Establishment has steadfastly resisted Trump's inclination to disengage from foreign
interventions. Moreover, the Pentagon has also resisted Trump's order to stop
indoctrinating its personnel in "Critical Race Theory." [
Trump's Anti-Critical Race Theory Order is Necessary But Insufficient , By Timon Cline,
AmGreatness.com, October 5, 2020]
In his book Rage , Bob Woodward
reports that former Defense Secretary and retired Marine General James Mattis once
commented to then Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats that "There may come a time when
we have to take collective action" against Trump, since Mattis deemed the president "dangerous"
and "unfit." [
Mattis told Coats Trump is 'dangerous,' 'unfit': Woodward book , by Tal Axelrod, The Hill,
September 9, 2020]
It's likely that General Mattis's view of Trump is widely shared among top level military
officers.
So how might the military figure into the Blob's wargaming plans? Peter van Buren has
contemplated a post-election scenario in which a "temporary" military government might be
pitched as the only way to break an electoral deadlock and end post-election disorder. [
What
if Trump Won't Leave The White House? The fearmongers are at it again, this time with their
mantle-holder Biden, warning of the coming dictatorship. , American Conservative, June 30,
2020] Van Buren reminded us that Trump's opponents have never accepted his legitimacy, that
"RussiaGate" was good practice for them -- good practice for a coup, that is -- and that they
are gearing up for an all-out effort to dislodge him from the White House.
Obama, Comey And
Eric Holder In The White House
Van Buren further noted that Joe Biden, who has claimed that it is Trump who "is going to
try and steal this election," has also stated quite plainly that if Trump refuses to leave the
White House, he is "absolutely convinced" that the military would "escort him from the White
House with great dispatch." [
Biden: Military Will Remove Trump From the White House if He Refuses to Leave, by Julie
Ross, Daily Beast, June 11, 2020]
It's worth mentioning that van Buren is not a Trump supporter, was a career foreign service
officer, and is an honest man, an Iraq war whistleblower who wrote an excellent book,
We Meant Well: How I
Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People , on his
experiences in that country. I reviewed it here ). He
does not believe that a Pentagon-backed coup is merely "paperback thriller material." It's a
plausible scenario.
Nevertheless, an attempt to use the military to block Trump's re-election could result in
the coup plotters stepping into a trap of their own making.
This is what happened in the failed 1991 coup attempt in the Soviet Union.
On August 18, 1991, with Mikhail Gorbachev preparing to sign a treaty that would have
decentralized the Soviet Union, his hardline political opponents in the Soviet leadership
arrested the father of perestroika at his Crimean dacha, proclaiming that the Soviet
State Committee on the State of Emergency was in charge.
The conspiracy against Gorbachev had been organized by KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov,
Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov and six other top level political and security officials. They
were alarmed by Gorbachev's reforms, which had already loosed centrifugal forces in the USSR
that threatened the power of the Communist party and the Soviet apparatus.
But within three days, the coup attempt collapsed.
Boris Yeltsin at the Russian White
House, August 19, 1991.
The coup collapsed because of resistance by then-Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin
and his supporters, and the refusal of elite military and security units to move against
them.
On August 19, Muscovites gathered at the Russian "White House," the seat of Russia's
parliament in central Moscow, and erected barriers around it. Boris Yeltsin climbed atop a tank
to address the crowd. Yeltsin condemned the State Emergency Committee as an unlawful gang of
coup plotters and called for military and security forces not to support the "Gang Of
Eight."
Major Sergey Yevdokimov, a battalion commander in the Tamanskaya Division, had already
declared his loyalty to Yeltsin (hence the tank on which Yeltsin made his historic stand).
Yevdokimov later said that early on he had decided that he would not fire on any
Russian citizens. As his battalion approached the "White House," one of Yeltsin's supporters
climbed on Yevdokimov's tank and asked him to come over to their side. The major made his
historically-significant choice, setting in motion events that would help thwart the coup.
KGB special forces units never appeared at the scene. When the planned assault on the
Russian "White House" ("Operation Thunder") failed to materialize after a brief skirmish, it
was clear that the coup was over. This was quickly followed by the collapse of the Communist
party and the Soviet administrative apparatus; and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
That was an
enormous surprise to the majority of Western Kremlinologists at the time.
Of course, the situation in the U.S. today is not exactly analogous. For starters, Trump is
operating in a hostile environment ("the Swamp") dominated and controlled by his enemies. The
generals are not on his side. It seems unlikely that a large group of citizens from the DC area
would quickly materialize to support Trump against some sort of military-backed coup.
It's possible, however, that Trump may not even be in Washington when a coup is set in
motion. This would leave him an opportunity to do what he does best -- hold mass rallies to
fire up his support base in "Deplorable" areas of the country.
If general disorder and a deadlock over the elections acts as a cover to deploy military
units, it raises the same question Soviet officers and men were faced with in August 1991:
Would the "boots on the ground" obey orders?
Trump may be disliked by top-level officers. But my sense is that he is popular with the
rank-and-file. What if a significant number of them refused to obey a clearly illegal order? It
may take only one Major Yevdokimov refusing unlawful orders for the whole plot to unravel.
The Deplorables have good reason to think the Blob will rig or otherwise reverse the
election results. The past four years have already taught them that. And the Blob's Main Stream
Media arm has been hard at it selling the Narrative of Trump stealing the election. The
Democrats' base appears to be ready and willing to accept drastic measures against Trump
and the Middle Americans they loathe.
The potential for a seismic political crisis is clear.
What we are witnessing is what I've called " the end of politics ." [
Chronicles , May 2019] American elections are becoming more like the zero-sum games they
are in the undeveloped world -- and were to some extent in
pre-modern Britain . A post-election crisis, especially a force majeure situation
precipitated by military intervention, would accelerate the centrifugal forces already at work
in the United States.
The failure of a coup attempt could do to the Democrats' "Coalition of the Fringes" what the
failure of the August coup did to the Communists in the USSR -- opening up
room to maneuver for what I call the American Remnant and VDARE.com calls the Historic
American Nation.
Given the circumstances, with the demographic ring closing in, that may be a providential
outcome.
I'm not as optimistic as Allensworth. Only one escort of the elites moved against
Gorbachev in 1991. Most of the rest held back. That allowed elite sector 2 to help Yeltsin
resist. Plus, the Jew Wolves of Wall Street swarmed in. So there's that.
The military the rank and file is heavily black, especially the career sergeants petty
officers who really carry out the officers orders. I think the Hispanic and White tank and
file will stay loyal. But follow orders from the anti White officer corps and black
sergeants
Consider the French Revolution. It didn't start till most of the officer corps were
revolutionary masons. The National Guards were revolutionary and so were the judges and
lawyers.
Every elite sector from the clergy through academia media professions and occupations
education both unions and employers Chamber of Commerce Association of manufacturers nurses
teachers Drs. Engineers construction probably big Agricultural which is all that matters any
more. Every organized group is against Trump
All Trump has is us individuals maybe half the adult population but just unorganized
individuals The Republican Party is organized but just as anti Trump and anti White as the
most hysterical liberals and Democrats.
Vindemann Jew immigrant colonel inserted into a position where he could get General Flynn
charged wit crime and the elected president impeached. There's Millions of Vindemanns in
tactical and strategic positions all over the country in every sector. The anti Trump anti
White revolutionaries already own media and communications
I hope I'm wrong. But what's been happening in America for the last 56 years and the
acceleration since 2016 fits the pattern of every successful revolution in the last 500
years.
"As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure
campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?"
I ask myself this question seemingly every day. Could U.S bureaucrats be so short sighted
where they cannot see the culture they are creating? Any sane follower of international
relations understands that poking a nuclear power with a stick is the work of fools. My
nightmare, that I have feared since I was a child, is a nuclear confrontation that would
result in the end of the human race.
Does rationality and common sense ever win out in Washington? I fear that our "endgame"
will result in a mushroom cloud....
This in reply to your #131 yesterday re JP Morgan, oligarch power and method used to create
Federal Reserve:
There is more. Banking has an odd and opaque history of global control of money/finance.
It was clear by ca. 1900 that the global keystone was control of USA banking...but how?,
because any USA legislation had to be signed-off by a President...the ONLY exception being
overriding a pres. veto. It could not be done in USA by pres. decree.
So the riddle is how could this rip-off be done in a freak nation that was an open society
of free public discourse full of very active politician? Even if Congress could be bribed and
otherwise cajoled to pass such legislation, how could any President be "arranged" to sign
it?
CLUE -- W. Wilson -- headmaster of Princeton University suddenly rose to Governor of New
Jersey , then suddenly ran for Pres of US. A most weird election resulted in WW becoming Pres
and in his first year signed the Fed Res Act. Boom! Done!
CLUE -- How did the bankers, Warburg et al, manage to put WW under their control? How did
they select WW and get hooks so deeply into headmaster WW and get him elected Pres.? What was
their secret?...and that could be kept secret? and never in writing.
The ANSWER might well be known only to surviving members of families of those involved in
WW's mysterious medical maladies. Though WW's doctors never disclosed publicly all his
medical data, related family members of consulted medical experts would likely have it as a
family secret...that WW had an "unspeakable" malady whose diagnosis was quietly handed down
to successive generations.
"As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure
campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?"
The endpoint is to weaken Russia and sabotaging its economy. Less income through oil and
gas exports means less money for weapons, which affects Russia's operations beyond its
borders, less money for hospitals, education, welfare etc. increasing domestic instability
etc.
Diplomatically Russia is also weakened by having its reputation tarnished, regardless of
whether it deserves it or not.
In order to get to the King, the pieces standing in front of it must be either taken out
or moved out of the way. Sanctions, informational and economic warfare are the only available
pieces on the chess board, short of direct military confrontation.
Not sure who this Andrei Martyanov is, but underlying all the comments is the proposition
that Putin-managed capitalism works great, will work great forever, will not have a crisis
ever and will make Russia totally independent in all ways. Stated so forthrightly, no doubt
it sounds too stupid to admit to. Nonetheless this is the claim. I say capitalist restoration
did not improve the Russian economy in the way implied by Martyanov. Putin is still a
Yeltsinite, even if he is sober enough to pass for competent.
I take the opposite view: Looking from today, Russia is lucky that the USSR collapsed in
1991. It shed its debt, its currency passed through hyperinflation, and their economy
collapsed and rebuilt. The US and most Western countries still have that coming for them, and
soon.
Plus beyond that the strict Communist/Marxist atheism over 70+ years lead to a rebirth of
Christian values in Russia, their biggest advantage in this cultural war. And they practice
science, not scientism.
Note: Russia and China are more capitalist than the US, for quite some time now. (12+
years)
@110 Abe as far as I understand it, the economic argument goes like this: take the number of
rubles generated/spent/whatever in Russian economic activity, then use the current conversion
rate to convert that into an "equivalent" amount of US dollars.
Then see what you can buy with that many US dollars.
If you went shopping in the USA, the answer would be that this many US dollars doesn't buy
you much, ergo, Russian economic activity is pathetically low.
An example: the Russian government might budget xxx (fill in the figure) rubles to buy new
T-90 tanks. In Washington they would convert that into US dollars, and then declare that this
is chicken-feed. Hardly enough to buy less than 10 Abrams tanks.
Only the Russians aren't buying Abrams tanks from the USA, and are not spending dollars.
They are buying T-90 tanks, and for the amount of rubles spent they'll get 50 tanks.
Every metric the US analyst are using tells them that the USA is vastly, vastly
outspending the Russians on military equipment, to the point where it is obvious that the
Russian military must be destitute and decrepit.
But if they every took the time to look they'll see 50 brand-spanking new T-90 main battle
tanks. Weapons that their assumptions say that the Russians can't afford, and would wonder
"Huh? Where'd they come from?"
@ Posted by: Andrei Martyanov | Oct 18 2020 4:11 utc | 96
I agree that comparing Russia's economy with the likes of Italy and Spain is ridiculous,
but it's not that simple. Capitalism is not what is appears to be.
If a (capitalist) nation wants to get something from another (capitalist) nation, it needs
to export something. There's no free lunch in international trade: if you want to import, you
have to export or issue sovereign debt bonds (treasury bonds).
In this scenario, either Russia produces everything it needs in its own territory or it
will have to export in order to import the technology it needs to do whatever it needs to do.
Remember: the Russian Federation is a capitalist nation-state, it has to follow the laws of
motion of capitalism, which take precedence over whatever Putin wants. To ignore that
economic laws exist is to deny any kind of theory of collapse; nation-states would then be
eternal, natural entities with no entropy.
Even if Russia produces everything it needs in its own territory, it is still capitalist.
It would need, in order to "substitute imports", to super-exploit its own labor force
(working class) in order to extract surpluses for its industrialization efforts. That's what
the USSR did during Stalin.
If Russia is doing the imports substitution in the classical way (the way Latin America
did during the liberal dictatorships of the 1950s-1980s), then it is trying to sell
commodities to industrialized countries in order to import technology and machinery necessary
to industrialize its own territory. That is probably the case here.
Assuming this more probable case, then I'm sorry to tell you it won't work. It may work in
the short or even medium term, but it will ultimately fail in the long term. The thing is
that, in a system of capitalist exchange between an agrarian and an industrial nation-state,
the industrial nation-state will always have the advantage (i.e. have a trade surplus).
That's because of Marx's labor theory of value: industrialized commodities ("manufactured
goods") have more intrinsic value than agrarian/raw material commodities - just think about
how many kilos of bananas Brazil would have to export to the USA in order to import one
single unit of an iPhone 12, to use an contemporary example. As a social result,
industrialized countries have a higher organic composition of capital (OCC) than agrarian
countries, as they need more value to just keep themselves afloat (as a metaphor: it's more
expensive to keep a big mansion than a little flat in a stationary state). Value (wealth)
then tends to flow from lower OCC to the higher OCC, this is the material base that divides
the First and Third World countries until today.
To make things even worse, raw materials/agricultural products have an inelastic demand,
which means their prices fall when production rises, and their prices rise when production
falls, relative to overall demand. You will pay whatever the water company will charge you
for the cubic meter of water - but you won't consume more or less water because of its price,
hence the term "inelastic": demand tends to be more or less constant on a macroeconomic
level. The same problem suffers the commodity exporter nations: there will come a stage where
their exports' overall value will collapse vis-a-vis the machinery and technology they need
to import.
As a result, the commodity exporter nations will have to get more debt overseas, by
issuing more T-bonds, just to keep the trade balance afloat. What was the quest for progress
becomes a vicious battle for mere survival. A debt crisis is brewed.
And that's exactly what happened to the Latin American countries in the 1980s-1990s: their
debt exploded and they were put to their knees by the USA (the country that issues the
universal fiat currency). The USA then charged their debt, which triggered a wave of
privatizations of everything those countries had built over decades. This is what will happen
to Russia if it falls for the lure of imports substitution.
That's why I urge the Russians to review their concepts and try to get back to the Soviet
times. It doesn't need to be exactly how it was before: you can make the due reforms and
adopt a more or less Chinese model of socialism. That's the only way out, if the Russian
people doesn't want to be enslaved by the liberals (capitalists).
@vk from what i'm reading (stephen cohen: soviet fates and lost alternatives) the chinese
adopted something like bukharin's nep policies, which stalin did his best to wipe out in the
ussr. i've got some problems with cohen's last book, "war with russia?" but he has a lot of
good information on the history of the ussr.
@ Posted by: pretzelattack | Oct 18 2020 15:14 utc | 118
On the surface, yes: the comparison between Reform and Opening Up and NEP are
irresistible. But it is not precise: the only merit it has is in the fact that it is fairer
than simply classifying Deng Xiaoping's reforms as neoliberalism (Trotskysts, Austrian
School) or capitalism (liberals).
The key here is the difference of the nature of the Chinese peasant class and the Russian
peasant class. The Chinese peasant class, besides suffering a lot (millions of dead by
famine) in the hands of a liberal government for decades (Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist
Government) (while the Russian equivalent - the "February Revolution" - only lasted a few
months, engulfed by their insistence on continuing with the meat-grinder of WWI), had a
different historical subtract.
Chinese late feudalism was much more developed, much more manufactured-centered than
Russian late feudalism. As a result, the Chinese peasant was much more proletarian-minded
than the feudal Russian peasant. Also, the Chinese didn't have the kulak problem (peasant
petite-bourgeoisie) - instead, they had regional warlords who self-destructed during the
chaotic republican period (1911-1949). When the warlords were gone, what was left was a much
more proletarian-minded, egalitarian-minded, small peasantry. This peasantry didn't bother to
migrate to the cities to work in the industry or to start their own factories in the
countryside itself. That's why Deng Xiaoping's Reform and Opening Up was successful - not
because of his genius, but because he was backed up by a capable people.
The Chinese peasantry, for example, didn't hoard or directed their grain surplus to
exports in order to starve the proletariat to death in the cities - they sold it to the
Chinese market. The Chinese peasantry also trusted their central government (CCP) and saw
itself as part of the project - in complete opposition to the feudal-minded Russian kulak,
who saw his piece of land as essentially an independent and self-sufficient
cell/ecosystem.
That's why the Reform and Opening Up was successful (it survives until the present times)
and the NEP soon failed - following the good harvest of 1924, came the awful harvest of 1926,
which triggered a shit show where the peasantry hoarded the grain and almost starved the USSR
to extinction, and which led to Stalin's ascension and the dekulakization process (forced
collectivization).
i should add that i know little about the actual history of communism, but capitalism is
revealing itself as a monstrous failure, and not all the propaganda in the world is
succeeding at covering that up.
I know how economic reasoning comes to that conclusion, but IRL comparing such different
countries only by GDP metric is insane and beyond stupid.
Eg. Russia has GDP similar to California!
Yes, in US centric GDP metrics that favors and cheats US itself (surprise!).
But. One of those countries sent man in space, produces everything, has vast resources and
is self sufficient nuclear superpower.
Other one cant even feed and provider water to its population without outside help.
GDP means nothing when sh*t hits the fan. What will "richer" country do if it goes to war
with "poorer"? Throw money at them while they launch nukes at it?
@ Posted by: pretzelattack | Oct 18 2020 16:11 utc | 122
There certainly are similarities between the NEP and the Reform and Opening Up. It's very
possible Deng Xiaoping took Lenin as inspiration.
Forgot to mention the Scissors Crisis, which erupted in 1923, and triggered the NEP. That
crisis is one more evidence that shows manufactured products are inherently more valuable
than raw materials/agrarian products.
Again, for products of Western "education" basic logic and ability for a basic
extrapolation seem beyond the grasp: there are no issues for Russia to produce anything,
other than time and some money. Country which produces best hi-tech weapons in the world,
dominates world's nuclear energy market (this is not your iPhone "hi tech") and has a full
enclosed cycle for aerospace industry, among many other things, will have little trouble in
substituting pretty much anything. I remember a bunch of morons, who pass for "analysts",
from either WSJ or WaPo declaring 6 years ago that sanctions will deny Russia access to
Western extraction technologies. Sure, for a country whose space program alone will crush
whole economies of UK or Germany should they ever try to recreate it, will have "problems"
producing compressor or drill equipment with the level of Russia's metallurgy and material
science. Generally speaking, West's present pathetic state is a direct result of utter
incompetence across the board in a number of key fields of human activity and your post, most
likely based on some BS by Western media, is a good demonstration of this state of the
affairs.
Per immigration policy, you can easily find a a truck load of resources, especially on the
web-sites of Russian diplomatic missions (Embassies, Consulates etc.), easily available. Per
cats--Russian love for cats is boundless and intense. You may say that Russia is a
cat-obsessed country;)
vk@120 posits a mystical cultural difference in Russian and Chinese peasants, which
unfortunately has pretty much the same content as the hypothesis of a racial difference. That
the morally superior race is supposed to be Chinese doesn't really help. As often, some
strange assertions of facts that aren't so accompany such bizarre thinking. The rich peasants
in China (what would be kulaks in Russian history,) were notorious for moneylending. As ever,
the inevitable arrears ended in the moneylender's family taking the land. Collectivization
came early in China, well along the way by 1956. And a key aspect of it was the struggle
against the Chinese equivalent of the kulak class. As for the insistence that private farming
is superior, the growth of inequality in land drove millions, a hundred million or more, into
the cities. Without residence permits this floating proletariat was effectively
superexploited by the new capitalist elements, as Deng meant them to do. Nor did the warlords
discredit themselves, not as a group. If anything the young warlord who forced Chiang to
reject active war against the Communists, in order to fight the Japanese invaders, was the
one who kept the GMD (KMT in Wade-Giles,) from discrediting itself. [Xian incident] And what
warlords had to do with the Chinese rich peasantry *after* the Revolution is a complete
mystery.
Socially, the deliberate uneven development promoted by Deng and his successors, is
eroding the social fabric of the larger countryside. This, in addition to the neocolonial
concessions, the growing links to the Chinese bourgeoisie of the diaspora suggest that as
Dengists may go even back/forward to a new form of warlordism. The thing about comparing
Bukharism/NEP to Dengism/the "Opening" is that Bukharin's program failed spectacularly. But
modern China is not next door to Nazi Germany. Even more to the point, Stalin's victory over
Hitler has provided a kind of moral shield for China, even under Deng, inspiring fear of
losing a general war. If Bukharin had beaten Stalin, we can be as sure as any hypothetical
can be, the USSR would have been defeated, not victorious. In modern China, the Bukharin won.
There is an excellent chance the national government of today's China will be defeated.
That article describes a 110 MW turbine that has now finally been put into production
(while Siemens, General Electric etc. produce utility-class gas turbines up to about 600 MW,
with far higher efficiency and most likely reliability). The article further describes 40 GW
of thermal electrical production to be "modernized" until 2031 (11 years from now), and
apparently a microscopic 2 GW of new capacity from "domestic and localized" 65 MW turbines to
be commissioned 2026-2028. (I don't understand Russian so I had to rely on Yandex's machine
translation.) That's admittedly some kind of progress, but is simply not going to cut it.
Nowhere close.
Imagine if China set the ambition to build its own semiconductors and its own turbofans
for its stealth fighters sometime around 2040. Imagine if China was still producing a third
of the amount of electricity of the United States instead of about double, etc., and
considered this to be adequate. It would be akin to abandoning its ambitions for
technological and industrial independence from the West, and that is exactly what Russia is
doing in the realm of gas turbines. There is apparently no capability and no seriousness
going into translating Russia's world-class research and science into actual large-scale,
modern industrial production, and everything points to this continuing, while you can blather
on all you want about people with "Western education" simply not getting anything.
That's admittedly some kind of progress, but is simply not going to cut it. Nowhere close.
That's admittedly you switching on "I am dense" mode and trying to up the ante with 600
MW, which are a unique product, while you somehow miss the point that 110 MWt MGT-110 of
fully Russian production has completed a full cycle of industrial tests and operations (an
equivalent of military IOC--Initial Operational Capability) and is in a serial production.
But instead of studying the issue (even if through Yandex translate) with Siemens which when
learning about MGT-110 offered Russia 100% localization with technology transfer, Russians
declined, you go into generalizations without having even minimal set of facts and
situational awareness. In fact 110 MWt turbines are most in demand product for a variety of
applications. Get acquainted with this.
I am not going to waste my time explaining to you (you will play dense again) what IOC
means and how it relates to serial production, I am sure you will find a bunch of unrealted
"argumentation".
Imagine if China
I don't need to imagine anything, as well as draw irrelevant parallels with China.
There is apparently no capability and no seriousness going into translating Russia's
world-class research and science into actual large-scale, modern industrial production, and
everything points to this continuing, while you can blather on all you want about people
with "Western education" simply not getting anything.
This is exactly what I am talking about. Hollow declarations by people who can not even
develop basic factual base.
It's great to see you here with your excellent facts and perspectives on Russia. I'm sorry
you have to deal with people whose minds are too small to grasp the immense scale of Russia -
scale in physical size, civilizational depth and importance to the balance of power in the
world.
Russia alone stopped the creeping gray hegemony from the west that had looked like it
would just ooze over the whole world and suffocate it in bullshit and tribute payments. And
then China joined in the fun. The world has a future now, when a decade ago this didn't seem
possible, at least from my view in the US. Geopolitically, Russia gave us this future, and
China has come to show us how much fun it's going to be.
@ Posted by: steven t johnson | Oct 18 2020 20:05 utc | 127
There's no mysticism here because we know how the kulaks emerged in Russia: they were the
result of the catastrophic capitalist reforms of the 1860s, which completely warped the old
feudal relations of the Russian Empire.
The reforms of the 1860s were catastrophic for two reasons:
1) it freed the peasants slowly. The State serfs - the last who gained their freedom -
were left with no land. A complex partition system of the land, based on each administrative
region, created a distorted division of land, where very few peasants got huge chunks of land
(the future kulaks) and most received almost nothing (as Lenin demonstrated, see his first
book of his Complete Works, below the rate of subsistence);
2) it tried to preserve the old feudal privileges and powers of the absolutist
monarchy.
As a result, the Russian Empire had a bizarre economic system, a mixed economy with the
worst of the two words: the inequality and absolute misery of capitalism and the backwardness
and lack of social mobility of feudalism.
But yes, you're right when you state Mao's era was not an economic failure. His early era
really saw an attempt by the CCP to make an alliance with the "national bourgeoisie", and
this alliance was indeed a failure. This certainly led to a more radical approach by the CCP,
still in the Mao era (collectivization). Life quality in China greatly increased after 1949,
until the recession of the Great Leap Forward (which was not a famine, but threw back some
socioeconomic indicators temporarily back to the WWII era). When the Great Leap Forward was
abandoned, China continued to improve afterwards.
All of this doesn't change the fact that China's "NEP" was a success, while the original
NEP wasn't. Of course, there are many factors that explain this, but it is wrong to call late
Qing China as even similar to the late Romanov Russia.
I'm not saying Stalin's reform were a failure. Without them, they wouldn't be able to
quickly import the Fordist (Taylorist) method they needed to industrialize. The USSR became a
superpower in just 19 years - a world record. The first Five-Year Plan was a huge morale
boost and success for the Soviet people - specially because it happened at the same time as
the capitalist meltdown of 1929.
--//--
@ Posted by: Eric | Oct 18 2020 20:53 utc | 128
The thing with semiconductors (and other very advanced technologies) is that it is an
industry that only makes sense for a given nation to dominate if they're going to mass
produce it. That usually means said production must be export oriented, which means competing
against already well-established competitors.
China doesn't want to drain the State's coffers to fund an industry that won't at least
pay for itself. It has to change the wheels with the car moving. That's why it is still
negotiating the Huawei contracts in the West first, why it still is trying to keep the
Taiwanese product flowing first, only to then gradually start the heavy investment needed to
dominate the semiconductor technology and production process.
They learned with the Soviets in this sense. When computers became a thing in the West,
the USSR immediately poured resources to build them. They were able to dominate the main
frame technology, and they were successfully implemented in their economy. Then came the
personal computers, and, this time, the Soviets weren't able to make it integrate in their
economy. The problem wasn't that the Soviets didn't know how to build a personal computer
(they did), but that every new technology is born for a reason, and only makes sense in a
given social context. You can't just blindly copy your enemy's technology and hope for the
best.
The world has a future now, when a decade ago this didn't seem possible, at least from my
view in the US. Geopolitically, Russia gave us this future, and China has come to show us
how much fun it's going to be. Many thanks to you and your people.
Thank you for your kind words. As my personal experience (my third book is coming out
soon)shows--explaining economic reality to people who have been "educated" (that is confused,
ripped off for huge tuition and given worthless piece of paper with MBA or some "economics"
Bachelor of "Science" on it) in Western pseudo-economic "theory" that this "global"
"rules-based order" is over, is pretty much an exercise in futility. And if a catastrophe of
Boeing is any indication (I will omit here NATO's military-industrial complex)--dividends,
stocks and "capitalization" is a figment of imagination of people who never left their office
and infantile state of development and swallowed BS economic narrative hook, line and sinker
without even trying to look out of the window. They still buy this BS of US having "largest
GDP in the world" (in reality it is much smaller than that of China), the
de-industrialization of the United States is catastrophic (they never bothered to look at
2018 Inter-agency Report to POTUS specifically about that)and its industrial base is
shrinking with a lighting speed, same goes to Germany which for now retains some residual
industrial capability and competences but:
This is before COVID-19, after it Germany's economy shrank worst among Western nations,
worse even than the US. It is a long story, but as Michael Hudson stated not for once in his
books and interviews, what is "taught" as economics in the West is basically a
pseudo-science. Well, it is. Or, as same Hudson stated earlier this year:"The gunboats don't
appear in your economics textbooks. I bet your price theory didn't have gun boats in them, or
the crime sector. And probably they didn't have debt in it either." And then they wonder in
Germany (or EU)how come that EU structures are filled with pedophiles, "Green" fanatics and
multiculturalists. Well, because Germany (and EU) are occupied territories who made their
choice. And this is just the start. What many do not understand here is that overwhelming
majority of Russians do not want to deal with Europe and calls for new Iron Curtain are
louder and louder and the process has started. Of course, there is a lot of both contempt and
schadenfreude on Russian part. As Napoleon stated, the nation which doesn't want to feed own
army, will feed someone else's. Very true. Modern West worked hard for it, let it "enjoy"
now.
It's good to see you commenting here as barflies seem more inclined to listen to you than
me. Did you watch Russian documentary on
The Wall , which I learned about from Lavrov's meeting with those doing business
within Russia on 5 Oct? I asked The Saker if his translation team would take on the task of
providing English subtitles or a voice over but never got a reply one way or the other. IMO,
for Russia to avoid the West's fate it must change its banking and financial system from the
private to the public realm as Hudson advocates most recently in this podcast . As for Mr.
Lavrov, he surprised the radio station interviewers by citing Semyon Slepakov's song "America
Doesn't Like Us," of which barfly Paco thankfully provided a translation of the
lyrics.С наилучшими
пожеланиями
крепкого
здоровья и
долгих лет
жизни!
I think you an Grieved misunderstand somewhat where I am coming from here. Michael Hudson
would be (and has been) the first to describe how Russia's elites (and to a large extent it
seems also the people) bought into a bogus neoliberal ideology teaching that somehow Russia
needs to earn the money it needs to build its own economy in the form of foreign currency
through export revenues. Apparently these economists and politicians in Russia never bothered
to look how Western economies actually operate (as opposed to what they preach to countries
they want to destroy), or for that matter how China has developed its economy (in all of
these countries, the necessary credit is created on a keyboard.) The export revenues that
Russia earns in the form of dollars and euros are sold to the central bank for the roubles
that Russia's government needs to function. Bizarrely, this creates just as much inflation as
it would if the central bank had just created the roubles without "backing" foreign currency.
In fact, there is more inflation created, because in times of high oil prices, corresponding
amounts of roubles are suddenly thrown into a domestic market that is underdeveloped, for
example in its infrastructure and its food processing. There are reasons why China can expand
its money supply by much greater proportions each year and still suffer far less inflation
than Russia.
Unlike China, Russia had already attained much of the technological expertise for the
equipment that it later decided it was unable to produce inside the country. A good example
of this are the turboexpanders whose design was perfected (though the basic idea was a bit
older) by Pyotr Kapisa in the 1930's in the USSR. This same technology went into the
turbopumps of the rocket engines in the Energia boosters. These engines are still to this
day, 30 years after the Soviet collapse, imported by the United States. As these rocket
engines including the turbopumps are still produced in Russia, the know-how to manufacture
was obviously not lost.
I read just the other day that as part of its import substitution program, Russia is
considering to produce the turboexpanders for processing natural gas (separating methane from
ethane) inside the country. Russia, with the world's largest natural gas reserves and
production, and as I described already possessing the expertise to produce the turboexpanders
needed for cryogenic separation, chose to hand over possibly billions of dollars to the West
to import this machinery over the years, only to be helpless when the West introduced
technological sanctions against its oil and gas sector. Very likely, in a couple of years we
will receive the announcement that the drive to produce them domestically has been abandoned,
after it was realized that their production will require new factories and new machinery,
which do not fall out of the sky in Russia as they apparently do in the West and in China.
Putin will announce that great business awaits whichever Western investor ready to provide
the funds. (Spoiler: They won't! The West is not very interested in investing into building
up Russia's industrial capabilities, preferring instead to loot its natural resources and to
suck out its skilled worked and scientists.)
While Russia sits and waits for higher oil prices or foreign dollar credit on the one
hand, and with unemployed skilled labor and rotting industrial infrastructure on the other
hand, China spends the equivalent of trillions of dollars (in yuan, obviously) into fixed
capital (not least infrastructure) each year. The funds for this are all created by
keystrokes by the PBOC and provide employment for the domestic workforce. You don't have to
ponder long on which model has been hugely successful, and which has been an unmitigated
disaster.
I can't find the exact figures right now, but Russia produces something like 300,000 STEM
graduates every year, more than the United States. (I may very well have read this originally
on your blog, by the way.) Many of them will still be forced to emigrate to find gainful
employment, even 20 years after the 1990's ended and Putin became President. These graduates
remain even in post-Soviet times of a very high quality, and undergraduate students in Russia
are trained at a higher level in mathematics and physics than in particular Americans are
even as post-graduates. By refusing to invest in its own scientific infrastructure and
industry the way China has done and does, Russia gives away all the education and training
that were provided to these students, especially to the same Western countries that are
seeking to destroy Russia. This is completely unforgivable.
I should add that I myself study physics in Germany. I have great appreciation for the
Russian methods of teaching mathematics and physics, as many do here. I have learned,
preferentially, mathematical analysis from Zorich, mechanics, electrodynamics etc. from
Landau-Lifschitz, much about Fourier series from Tolstov, and so on, and have very often been
awestruck and inspired in a mystical fashion by these works. I am not somehow unaware of the
unparalleled quality (in particular after the destruction of Germany in WWII) of the USSR's
and Russia's math/physics education or unfamiliar with the achievements of the USSR in
science and engineering. It's precisely because I am familar with them that it
frustrates me immensely how Russia's potential is needlessly wasted.
What many do not understand here is that overwhelming majority of Russians do not want to
deal with Europe and calls for new Iron Curtain are louder and louder and the process has
started. Of course, there is a lot of both contempt and schadenfreude on Russian part.
Andrei (132), do you have a link to an opinion poll that supports this? Thanks
in advance.
@ Digby | Oct 19 2020 0:28 utc | 136.. if you haven't already listened to the lavrov
interview that b linked to in his main post - it is a question and answer thing - you would
benefit from doing so and it would help answer you question some too.. see b's post at this
spot -"In a wide ranging interview with Russian radio stations" and hit that link
@ james (137)
Well, I looked into the interview. While it is informative in its own right (at some point it
briefly touches on Russo-Japanese relations), and some of the interviewers do show some
concerns, I'm still not sure how it helps answer my question (maybe I missed something?). My
initial impression was that Mr. Martyanov was referring to Russian civilians - not just radio
interviewers.
Thanks anyway for the heads up.
@ 138 digby... my impression was the radio interviewers questions were a reflection of the
general sentiment of the public.. i could be wrong, but it seems to me they have completely
given up on the west based on what they ask and say in their questions to lavrov...
on another note, you might enjoy engaging andrei more directly on his website which i will
share here...
The moment the New York Post reported on some of the sleazy, corrupt details contained on
Hunter Biden's hard drive, Twitter and Facebook, the social media giants most closely connected
to the way Americans exchange political information, went into overdrive to suppress the
information and protect Joe Biden. In the case of Facebook, though, perhaps one of those
protectors was, in fact, protecting herself.
The person currently in charge of Facebook's election integrity program is Anna Makanju .
That name probably doesn't mean a lot to you, but it should mean a lot – and in a
comforting way -- to Joe Biden.
Before ending up at Facebook, Makanju was a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic
Council. The Atlantic Council is an ostensibly non-partisan think tank that deals with
international affairs. In fact, it's a decidedly partisan organization.
In 2009, James L. Jones, the Atlantic Council's chairman left the organization to be
President Obama's National Security Advisor. Susan Rice, Richard Holbrooke, Eric Shinseki,
Anne-Marie Slaughter, Chuck Hagel, and Brent Scowcroft also were all affiliated with the Atlantic Council
before they ended up in the Obama administration.
The Atlantic Council has received massive amounts of foreign funding over the years. Here's
one that should interest everyone: Burisma Holdings donated $300,000
dollars to the Atlantic Council, over the course of three consecutive years, beginning in
2016. The information below may explain why it began paying that money to the Council.
Not only was the Atlantic Council sending people into the Obama-Biden administration, but it
was also serving as an outside advisor. And that gets us back to Anna Makanju, the person
heading Facebook's misleadingly titled "election integrity program."
Makanju also worked at the Atlantic Council. The following is the relevant part of Makanju's
professional bio from her page at the Atlantic Council
(emphasis mine):
Anna Makanju is a nonresident senior fellow with the Transatlantic Security Initiative.
She is a public policy and legal expert working at Facebook, where she leads efforts to
ensure election integrity on the platform. Previously, she was the special policy adviser for
Europe and Eurasia to former US Vice President Joe Biden , senior policy adviser to
Ambassador Samantha Power at the United States Mission to the United Nations, director for
Russia at the National Security Council, and the chief of staff for European and NATO Policy
in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. She has also taught at the Woodrow Wilson School
at Princeton University and worked as a consultant to a leading company focused on space
technologies.
Makanju was a player in the faux Ukraine impeachment. Early in December 2019, when the
Democrats were gearing up for the impeachment, Glenn Kessler
mentioned her in an article assuring Washington Post readers that, contrary to the Trump
administration's claims, there was nothing corrupt about Biden's dealings with Ukraine. He made
the point then that Biden now raises as a defense: Biden didn't pressure Ukraine to fire
prosecutor Viktor Shokin to protect Burisma; he did it because Shokin wasn't doing his job when
it came to investigating corruption.
Kessler writes that, on the same day in February 2016 that then-Ukrainian President
Poroshenko announced that Shokin had offered his resignation, Biden spoke to both Poroshenko
and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. The White House version is that Biden gave both men pep
talks about reforming the government and fighting corruption. And that's where Makanju comes
in:
Anna Makanju, Biden's senior policy adviser for Ukraine at the time, also listened to the
calls and said release of the transcripts would only strengthen Biden's case that he acted
properly. She helped Biden prepare for the conversations and said they operated at a high
level, with Biden using language such as Poroshenko's government being "nation builders for a
transformation of Ukraine."
A reference to a private company such as Burisma would be "too fine a level of
granularity" for a call between Biden and the president of another country, Makanju told The
Fact Checker. Instead, she said, the conversation focused on reforms demanded by the
International Monetary Fund, methods to tackle corruption and military assistance. An
investigation of "Burisma was just not significant enough" to mention, she said.
Let me remind you, in case you forgot, that Burisma started paying the Atlantic Council a
lot of money in 2016, right when Makanju was advising Biden regarding getting rid of
Shokin.
Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.
That's right folks, the Facebook executive currently blocking all of the negative evidence
of Hunter and Joe Biden's corrupt activity in Ukraine is the same person who was coordinating
the corrupt activity between the Biden family payoffs and Ukraine.
You just cannot make this stuff up folks.
The incestuous networking between Democrats in the White House, Congress, the Deep State,
the media, and Big Tech never ends. That's why the American people wanted and still want Trump,
the true outsider, to head the government. They know that Democrats have turned American
politics into one giant Augean Stable and that Trump is
the Hercules who (we hope) can clean it out.
"... Russia is militarily secure and the 'west' knows that. It is one reason for the anti-Russian frenzy. Russia does not need to bother with the unprecedented hostility coming from Brussels and Washington. It can ignore it while taking care of its interests. ..."
"... As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint? ..."
"... The nightmare scenario for the Anglo-Americans is a Germany-Russia-China triangle. If that happens it is game over! ..."
"... They don't want an actual war. They just ratchet up the tensions to keep Europe subdued and obedient and Russia off balance and thereby prevent any rapprochement between the two. ..."
"... The strong hatred and hostility coming from the US and the EU are due to the understanding that they don't have much time, and they must act now, or tomorrow it will be too late. ..."
"... Years ago Barack Obama gave speech to West Point graduates, proclaiming US moral and racial superiority (because they mix'n's*it) over whole world, Goebbels would be proud. Germany has long history of hating all those Slavs, and Israel... Lets not go there with how they threat those inferior brown people. ..."
"... Of course that end-point is money for military contractors and power for the FP elite in government and think-tanks which also means money. Yes, there are true-believers who see a mighty struggle between "good" (the USA) an "evil" (Russia/China) but they are incompetent. As for the American people they will believe whatever the NY Times says since they are militantly ignorant of history, geography, foreign affairs in general, and, above all, political science. ..."
"... The USA is lucky the USSR collapsed in 1991. If it managed to somehow survive for mere 17 years more, it would catch the 2008 capitalist meltdown ..."
"... It looks like the USA imported the Irish and imported their luck, too. ..."
"... This loathing was made blatantly manifest during WWII, of course, but it didn't die out because that generation and more likely their children remain with us. Ditto the generational Anglo-American hatred of Russians (yes, for the UK, and their haute bourgeoisie, it has deeper historical roots than the 20thC) and the USSR even more... ..."
"... "Maas added that Germany takes decisions related to its energy policy and energy supply 'here in Europe', saying that Berlin accepts ' the fact that the US had more than doubled its oil imports from Russia last year and is now the world's second largest importer of Russian heavy oil .'" [My Emphasis] ..."
"... The neocon/NATO aggressive expansionism has many purposes, but one is surely domestic repression: to gaslight and cause fear-the-foreign-bogeyman trauma among the American and British people as a whole and make most of them become docile and lose their critical thinking skills and their ability to analyze their own societies. ..."
"... One of the best ways to lobotomize the publics of the US and UK is to very gradually impose martial law in the name of protecting national security and ensuring peace and harmony at home. ..."
"... At the time, I thought it was just Trump and his followers freaking out, now I think it's the NatSec people, who have finally seen the truth of their situation. As one can see in the Atlantic Council piece B posted, they are still trying to keep the old narrative patched together too. ..."
"... As I've said numerous times -- Fuck the US Empire and it's minion bitches. Jesse Ventura commented this past week that EVERY US Incumbent politician should be voted out of office this election. 99% of them are scum. ..."
"... That was the whole point of the first Cold War. It is the whole point of creating a Cold War 2.0. Absolutely nothing has changed. ..."
"... If the Russian Federation really has an ongoing imports substitution program, then this explains everything. Germany is an exports-oriented economy. It wants to integrate with the Russian economy in the sense to keep it as an agrarian-extrativist economy to feed it with cheap commodities to feed their industry. Germany's ideal Russia is Brazil. ..."
"... A Russia that also exports high-value commodities (manufactured commodities) is a direct threat to Germany, as it competes with it directly in the international market. That's the reason Germany doesn't want the BRI to come to Europe, as Merkel once said: Europe must not become China's peninsula. China is Germany's main competitor, as it is also a big manufacturing exporter. ..."
"... Perhaps the US only has one script in the playbook: to balkanise, disrupt and foster 5th columns until their opponent becomes a dysfunctional or failed state. ..."
"... The US and EU attempts to break Russia's independent foreign policy are just stepping stones to the eventual goal of a breakup Russia itself, never forget Albright's comments in the 90s about how Siberia shouldn't belong to Russia alone. ..."
"... We may yet see a Cuban missile crisis scenario but it looks more likely to be caused by arms sales to Taiwan than conflict in the Caucasus. ..."
"... I also think its naive to see these as "fires burning at Russia's borders" instead of as deliberately set bear traps . Azerbaijan is in a strategic location between Russia and Iran and the conflict with Armenia comes just before Russia is about to sell advanced weapons to Iran. ..."
Over the last years the U.S. and its EU puppies have ratcheted up their pressure on Russia.
They seem to believe that they can compel Russia to follow their diktat. They can't. But the
illusion that Russia will finally snap, if only a few more sanctions ar applied or a few more
houses in Russia's neighborhood are set on fire, never goes away.
The fires burning at Russia's borders in the Caucasus are an add-on to the disorder and
conflict on its Western border in neighboring Belarus, where fuel is poured on daily by
pyromaniacs at the head of the European Union acting surely in concert with Washington.
Yesterday we learned of the decision of the European Council to impose sanctions on
President Lukashenko, a nearly unprecedented action when directed against the head of state
of a sovereign nation.
...
It is easy enough to see that the real intent of the sanctions is to put pressure on the
Kremlin, which is Lukashenko's guarantor in power, to compound the several other measures
being implemented simultaneously in the hope that Putin and his entourage will finally crack
and submit to American global hegemony as Europe did long ago.
...
The anti-Russia full tilt ahead policy outlined above is going on against a background of the
U.S. presidential electoral campaigns. The Democrats continue to try to depict Donald Trump
as "Putin's puppy," as if the President has been kindly to his fellow autocrat while in
office. Of course, under the dictates of the Democrat-controlled House and with the
complicity of the anti-Russian staff in the State Department, in the Pentagon, American
policy towards Russia over the entire period of Trump's presidency has been one of never
ending ratcheting up of military, informational, economic and other pressures in the hope
that Vladimir Putin or his entourage would crack. Were it not for the nerves of steel of Mr.
Putin and his close advisers , the irresponsible pressure policies outlined above could
result in aggressive behavior and risk taking by Russia that would make the Cuban missile
crisis look like child's play.
The U.S. arms industry lobby, in form of the Atlantic Council, confirms
the 'western' strategy Doctorow describes. It calls for 'ramping up on Russia' with even more
sanctions:
Key to raising the costs to Russia is a more proactive transatlantic strategy for sanctions
against the Russian economy and Putin's power base, together with other steps to reduce
Russian energy leverage and export revenue. A new NATO Russia policy should be pursued in
tandem with the European Union (EU), which sets European sanctions policy and faces the same
threats from Russian cyberattacks and disinformation. At a minimum, EU sanctions resulting
from hostilities in Ukraine should be extended, like the Crimea sanctions, for one year
rather than every six months. Better yet, allies and EU members should tighten sanctions
further and extend them on an indefinite basis until Russia ends its aggression and takes
concrete steps toward de-escalation.
It also wants Europe to pay for weapons in the Ukraine and Georgia:
A more dynamic NATO strategy for Russia should go hand in hand with a more proactive policy
toward Ukraine and Georgia in the framework of an enhanced Black Sea strategy. The goal
should be to boost both partners' deterrence capacity and reduce Moscow's ability to
undermine their sovereignty even as NATO membership remains on the back burner for the time
being.
As part of this expanded effort, European allies should do more to bolster Ukraine and
Georgia's ground, air, and naval capabilities, complementing the United States' and Canada's
efforts that began in 2014.
The purpose of the whole campaign against Russia, explains the Atlantic Council author, is
to subordinate it to U.S. demands:
Relations between the West and Moscow had begun to deteriorate even before Russia's watershed
invasion of Ukraine, driven principally by Moscow's fear of the encroachment of Western
values and their potential to undermine the Putin regime. With the possibility of a further
sixteen years of Putin's rule, most experts believe relations are likely to remain
confrontational for years to come. They argue that the best the United States and its allies
can do is manage this competition and discourage aggressive actions from Moscow. However, by
pushing back against Russia more forcefully in the near and medium term, allies are more
likely to eventually convince Moscow to return to compliance with the rules of the liberal
international order and to mutually beneficial cooperation as envisaged under the 1997
NATO-Russia Founding Act.
The 'rules of the liberal international order' are of course whatever the U.S. claims they
are. They may change at any moment and without notice to whatever new rules are the most
convenient for U.S. foreign policy.
But as Doctorow said above, Putin and his advisors stay calm and ignore such trash despite
all the hostility expressed against them.
One of Putin's close advisors is of course Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. In a
wide
ranging interview with Russian radio stations he recently touched on many of the issues
Doctorow also mentions. With regards to U.S. strategy towards Russia Lavrov diagnoses
:
Sergey Lavrov : [...] You mentioned in one of your previous questions that no matter what we
do, the West will try to hobble and restrain us, and undermine our efforts in the economy,
politics, and technology. These are all elements of one approach.
Question : Their national security strategy states that they will do so.
Sergey Lavrov : Of course it does, but it is articulated in a way that decent people can
still let go unnoticed, but it is being implemented in a manner that is nothing short of
outrageous.
Question : You, too, can articulate things in a way that is different from what you would
really like to say, correct?
Sergey Lavrov : It's the other way round. I can use the language I'm not usually using to
get the point across. However, they clearly want to throw us off balance , and not only by
direct attacks on Russia in all possible and conceivable spheres by way of unscrupulous
competition, illegitimate sanctions and the like, but also by unbalancing the situation near
our borders, thus preventing us from focusing on creative activities. Nevertheless,
regardless of the human instincts and the temptations to respond in the same vein, I'm
convinced that we must abide by international law.
Russia does not accept the fidgety 'rules of the liberal international order'. Russia
sticks to the law which is, in my view, a much stronger position. Yes, international law often
gets broken. But as Lavrov
said elsewhere , one does not abandon traffic rules only because of road accidents.
Russia stays calm, no matter what outrageous nonsense the U.S. and EU come up with. It can
do that because it knows that it not only has moral superiority by sticking to the law but it
also has the capability to win a fight. At one point the interviewer even jokes
about that :
Question : As we say, if you don't listen to Lavrov, you will listen to [Defense Minister]
Shoigu.
Sergey Lavrov : I did see a T-shirt with that on it. Yes, it's about that.
Yes, it's about that. Russia is militarily secure and the 'west' knows that. It is one
reason for the anti-Russian frenzy. Russia does not need to bother with the unprecedented
hostility coming from Brussels and Washington. It can ignore it while taking care of its
interests.
As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure
campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?
Posted by b on October 17, 2020 at 16:31 UTC | Permalink
thanks b.... that lavrov interview that karlof1 linked to previously is
worth its weight in gold...
it gives a clear understanding of how russia sees what is
happening here on the world stage... as you note cheap talk from the atlantic council 'rules
of the liberal international order' is no substitute for 'international law' which is what
russia stands on.... as for the usa campaign to tar russia and claim trump is putins puppet..
apparently this stupidity really sells in the usa.. in fact, i have a close friend here in
canada from the usa with family in the usa has bought this hook, line and sinker as well..
and he is ordinarily a bright guy!
as for the endpoint - the usa and the people of the usa don't mind themselves about
endpoints... it is all about being in the moment, living a hollywood fantasy off the ongoing
party of wall st... the thought this circus will end, is not something many of them
contemplate.. that is what it looks like to me.. maga, lol...
Belarus - this is happenstance, not long term planning. Like Venezuela - indeed neither
original Presidential candidate nor his wife had a Wikipedia entry a week or so before being
announced as candidate (much like Guaido 2 weeks before Trump "made" him President.
Yes the Western media make the most of it, and yes there are many in place in and besides the
media whose job it is to maximise any noise. But little is happening in Belarus. Sanctioning
is all anyone can do now. (Sanctions = punishment therefore proof of guilt without trial or
evidence).
US pressure is based on the Dem vs Rep "I am tougher on Russia than you" game spurred on
by the MIC.
European pressure is based on the Euro Defence force concept and a low key but real desire to
rid itself of Nato. So again we have Nato saying "without US/us Europe would be soft on
Russia" and Europe saying we are tough on Russia whatever.
What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?
It is about driving a wedge between Europe and Russia. The nightmare scenario for the
Anglo-Americans is a Germany-Russia-China triangle. If that happens it is game
over!
They don't want an actual war. They just ratchet up the tensions to keep Europe subdued
and obedient and Russia off balance and thereby prevent any rapprochement between the
two.
Putin has repeatedly stated he wants a Lisbon to Vladivostok free trade area.
The Anglo-Americans will never permit that. That Europe is committed to a course that is
against their own best interest shows just how subservient they are to the
Anglo-Americans.
I think it was the first head of NATO that said the purpose of the organization is to
"keep the Russians out, the Germans down and the US in"
There is no endpoint. Those who argue for it, the Western think-tank industry and security
and intelligence industry, are recipients of huge sums of money. It is bread and butter for
large numbers of people. And the acceptance of the conclusions and advice of the immense
stacks of papers thus produced mean money towards the defense industry and the cyber warfare
industry. In the end, all this is driven by elites' fear of their own populations. Sowing FUD
(Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) makes these populations docile. Rinse and repeat.
>>As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure
campaign is.
The reason was probably the new Russian Constitution, which is basically a declaration of
independence from the West. This has caused serious triggerings in western elites, although
their reaction took some time to crystalise due to the Covid Pandemic.
>>What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?
The endpoint is - EU and NATO move into Ukraine, Moldova, Serbia, Georgia, Belarus,
Armenia.
A puppet government of someone like Navalny is installed Russia. That government further
gives up Crimea, Kaliningrad and Northen Caucasus. In the long run, a soft partition of Russia into 3 parts follows (as per the Grand
Chessboard 1997).
The possibility for that happening is overall negative, as the West is on a long term
decline, that is, it will be weaker in 2030, and even weaker in 2040 or 2050.
OECD economies were 66 % of the world economy in 2010 but that share is estimated to drop
to 38 % of the world economy in 2050 (with further drops after that).
The strong hatred and hostility coming from the US and the EU are due to the understanding
that they don't have much time, and they must act now, or tomorrow it will be too
late.
Well, the hostility in "western" "elite" (rulers) towards Russia is on much more primal level
than money and power IMO. It is pure racial hatred combined with Übermensch God complex.
Main controllers in modern "west" are US, Israel and Germany.
Years ago Barack Obama gave speech to West Point graduates, proclaiming US moral and
racial superiority (because they mix'n's*it) over whole world, Goebbels would be proud.
Germany has long history of hating all those Slavs, and Israel... Lets not go there with how
they threat those inferior brown people.
"What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?"
Of course that end-point is money for military contractors and power for the FP elite in
government and think-tanks which also means money. Yes, there are true-believers who see a
mighty struggle between "good" (the USA) an "evil" (Russia/China) but they are incompetent.
As for the American people they will believe whatever the NY Times says since they are
militantly ignorant of history, geography, foreign affairs in general, and, above all,
political science.
The problem as I see it is Europe generally, and Germany in particular. Why do they follow
Washington diktats?
Well let's see, the USA is $30 trillion in debt and counting, faces an upcoming economic
depression to rival the 'great' one, with a citizenry on the brink of civil war and a
political system that makes a 'banana republic' look like ancient Greece. Desperate is as
desperate does.
As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure
campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?
For a very simple reason: there's no other option. Capitalism can only work in one way. There's a limit to how much capitalism can reform
within itself without self-destructing.
The West is also suffering from the "Whale in a Swimming Pool" dilemma: it has grown so
hegemonic, so big and so gloated that its strategic options have narrowed sharply. It has not
much more room for maneuver left, its bluffs become less and less effective. As a result, its
strategies have become increasingly linear, extremely predictable. The "whale in a pool
dilemma" is not a problem when your inner workings (domestic economy) is flourishing; but it
becomes one when the economy begins to stagnate and, ultimately, decline (albeit slowly).
On a side note, it's incredible how History is non-linear, full of surprises. The Russian
Federation is inferior to the Soviet Union in every aspect imaginable. Except for one factor:
it now has an ascendant China on its side in a time where the West is declining. (Historical)
context is everything.
The USA is lucky the USSR collapsed in 1991. If it managed to somehow survive for mere 17
years more, it would catch the 2008 capitalist meltdown and have an opportunity to gain the
upper hand over capitalism (plus have a strong China on its side). Socialism/communism
wouldn't have been demoralized the way it was in the 1990s, opening a huge flank for
revolutions in the Western Hemisphere (specially Latin America). NATO would be much weaker.
Since the USSR was closed to capitalism, the USA wouldn't be able to enforce as crippling
economic sanctions on China and the USSR. The USSR would be able to "reform and open up" in a
much safer environment (by copying China, instead of Yeltsin's neoliberalism), thus gaining
the opportunity to make a Perestroika that could actually work.
But it didn't happen. Well, what can I say? It looks like the USA imported the Irish and imported their luck,
too.
Abe @7 - I would agree and have raised somewhere (old age?) that part of what we are seeing
in this latest western-NATO cooked up charade re Navalny is, in part at least, a deep
historical supremacist loathing of the Slavs an in general and the Russians in particular by
the haute bourgeois Germans. This loathing was made blatantly manifest during WWII, of
course, but it didn't die out because that generation and more likely their children remain
with us. Ditto the generational Anglo-American hatred of Russians (yes, for the UK, and their
haute bourgeoisie, it has deeper historical roots than the 20thC) and the USSR even more...
The pressure on Russia is enormous and I would enlarge on the economic sanctions aspect
(siege warfare): Belarus, Armenia-Azerbaijan (Erdogan once again playing his role for the
US/NATO - in this business, Iran is also a target), Kyrgyzstan - all on or very close to
Russia's borders and thus dividing and draining (intention) Russia's focus and $$$$ (the
Brzezinski game) in order to open it up to the western corporate-capitalist bloodsuckers. And
I suspect that as the US (and UK) economies drain away, so these border country "revolts,"
"protests" etc. will grow...
Russia really needs to join with China in full comity. Bugger the west - they do not
respect the rights of either country to their own culture, societal structures, mores,
perspectives...nor apparently even those countries' rights to their own coastal waters, air
space...
One wonders how the USA would react to Chinese and/or Russian warships in the Gulf or
traversing (lengthwise) the Atlantic or Pacific????
"Maas added that Germany takes decisions related to its energy policy and energy supply 'here in Europe', saying
that Berlin accepts ' the fact that the US had more than doubled its oil imports from Russia last year and is now the
world's second largest importer of Russian heavy oil .'" [My Emphasis]
Now isn't that the interesting bit of news!! The greatest fracking nation on the planet needs to import heavy oil (likely
Iranian, unlikely Venezuelan) from its #1 adversary. As for the end game, I've written many times what I see as the goal and
don't see any need to add more.
"The Russians are coming' is a long standing fear built the American psyche almost from the
very start.
Russian colonization of the California Territory outnumbered the US population.
The Monroe Doctrine was all about that,not S.America at all. The Brits ruled S.America by
mercantile means until
WWI cut the sea lanes, then and only then did it fall into the sphere of Yankee control.
Then there is Alaska. The Sewards Folly documents are almost certainly fakes, the verified
Russian copy says a 100year LEASE,not a sale. The National Archives refuses examination by any
but its own experts. Unless they are forgeries and they know it there can be no real reason for
their stance.
There is much more background to the antipathy than many are aware.
@bjd (4) You nailed it, my friend. Cold wars are immensely profitable for certain sectors of
the economy and the parasites who run them. The supreme imperative is always to have
enemies--really big, bad, dangerous enemies--whether real or imagined. I will be voting for
Biden, but I don't have much hope for positive change in American foreign policy. Russia,
China, Iran, Venezuela, etc. will continue to be vilified as nations to be feared and hated.
The neocon/NATO aggressive expansionism has many purposes, but one is surely domestic
repression: to gaslight and cause fear-the-foreign-bogeyman trauma among the American and
British people as a whole and make most of them become docile and lose their critical
thinking skills and their ability to analyze their own societies.
One of the best ways to
lobotomize the publics of the US and UK is to very gradually impose martial law in the name
of protecting national security and ensuring peace and harmony at home.
After several color
revolutions succeeded, the Russiagate/Spygate op was carried out in the US, with British
assistance. This op has been largely successful, though there has been limited resistance
against its whole fake edifice as well as with the logic of Cold War2.0. Nevertheless,
Spygate has shocked many tens of millions of Dems into a stupor, while millions more are
dazed and manipulated by the Chinese bogeyman being manufactured by Trump. The most dangerous
result of the martial law lite mentality caused by Spygate and its MSM purveyors is the
growing support for censorship of free speech coming mostly from the Dems, such as Schiff and
Warner. The danger inherent in this trend became very clear when FaceBook and Twitter engaged
in massive and unprecedented arbitrary censorship of the New York Post and of various
Trump-related accounts. This is the kind of thing you do during Stage 1 of a coup. Surely it
was at least in part an experiment to see how various power points in the US would respond.
Even though Twitter ended the censorship later, it was probably a successful experiment
designed to gauge reactions and areas of resistance. In November, there could be further,
more serious experiments/ops. If so, the current expansionist movements being made and
planned by the US and NATO may well be integral parts of a new non-democratic model of
"American-style democracy" -- not constitution-based but "rules-based."
"As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure
campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?"
I think the answer is clear. The US economy is collapsing and likewise those wedded to the US
dollar system. The USA spent 90% more than it received last year.
They are desperate to have access to Russia's largely untapped resources and it doesn't want
any competition for its position as world hegemon. Thus Russia and China are in the
crosshairs.
Fortunately the corruption in the USA has resulted in a weaker military capability over time
and they are reduced to behaving in clandestine and terroristic ways to try and achieve this.
The turmoil enveloping the USA is scape goated on Trump and Covid19 but is ultimately due to
their faltering economy and a big helping of financial corruption. Talk about your chickens
coming home to roost
Sounds like thunder, all those chickens. I appeared to me that whomever is in charge here, they started pulling all the levers they
could lay a hand on a couple weeks back in terms of stirring up trouble. Throwing sand in the
eyes of ones enemy.
At the time, I thought it was just Trump and his followers freaking out, now I think it's
the NatSec people, who have finally seen the truth of their situation. As one can see in the
Atlantic Council piece B posted, they are still trying to keep the old narrative patched
together too.
Politfiction, or what could have happened if is an entertaining but futile exercise.
Everybody agrees, there was no need for the USSR to dissolve, it was like a big jackpot for
an amazed rival that rushed to declare himself the winner. The price has been high, on both
sides of the fence but of course with a lot more victims and destruction on the other side of
the fallen wall. Gorbachov a tragic figure and Yelstyn a sinister one, in spite of his being
a clown, a tragic one at that, bombing his parliament and laughing at the world together with
the degenerate Clinton, the 90's were somber indeed. The west paid its price, a self declared
victory that did not bring any benefit, the peace dividend never was, to the contrary,
military budgets never stopped growing year after year. The end of history was proclaimed, no
need to match or better the rival ideology, there is none, so proles you better stop
complaining, or else and that's where we are.
Just to repeat the obvious, for the US actually to go to war is out of the question these
days -- the US public would not tolerate the casualties. Therefore other methods have to be
found to achieve the same objectives -- the maintenance of an eternal enemy in 1984 style, to
keep up military budgets and world hegemony, neither of which are the elite ready to abandon.
Economic sanctions have been the weapon of choice in the age of Trump, but there isn't really
any other. Sometimes they are better aimed and sometimes not.
In any case I am not sure I agree that the EU is really submissive to the US in this
respect. They don't want to offend the US, and some leaders have genuinely swallowed the
Kool-Aid, but others haven't, and the continuation of Nordstream 2 is where they haven't.
Doctorow wrote "Of course, under the dictates of the Democrat-controlled House and with the
complicity of the anti-Russian staff in the State Department, in the Pentagon, American
policy towards Russia over the entire period of Trump's presidency..."
The Senate is more
important for foreign affairs and has been Republican for Trump's entire term. The House was
also Republican for half of Trump's term. Lastly the "staff" is not really able to run things
in the presence of a minimally competent administrator, at the head of the State Department,
acting under leadership of a competent, energetic president. There is no sign Doctorow is
particularly intelligent or insightful.
I have long ago lost track of where the bar's consensus on Turkey is, whether the failing
US means Erdogan must become the follower of the skilled, brave and indefatigable Putin...or
whether his sultanship is suicidally persisting in thinking Russia cannot actually deliver
anything his sultanship really needs and wants. At any rate it is entirely unclear what
"international law" Lavrov thinks supports Russia.
As to the China Russia "alliance," the difficulty is that Putin has so very little to
offer.
I can hazard a guess to answer your final question. I think corruption is probably the main
reason. Those involved in this are mostly interested in self-enrichment through the
gullibility of their societies. I don't think the stenographers and the hot-heads neo liberals
pushing for a show-down with Russia are intent on committing suicide by igniting a hot war
with Russia, but they hope that Moscow could be intimidated and surrender eventually. As you
rightly said, it is a pipe dream of course, but they get paid heavily for the hot air they
emit.
'As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure
campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?'
The endpoint is quite clear: 'Global Governance, by Global Institutions under control of
the 'Globalists' (i.e. the Davos crowd).' For this, the 'Globalists' must subdue Russia.
Russia is not only blocking the 'Globalist's' plans in its own right, but, since 2013, it
has been protecting other nations from falling prey to 'Globalist' colonization (Syria,
Eastern Ukraine, Iran, Venezuela, Libya, Belarus, etc.). And Russia is the lynch-pin to
enable the 'Globalists' to corner China.
In addition, together with China, Russia is offering the world an alternative to
'Globalism', a 'Multi-Polar World Order' that is much more attractive than becoming a
'Globalist' vassal.
For the 'Globalists' time has become critical. They are facing revolts in their home
countries (Trump, Brexit, Gilets-Jaunes, etc.). The main source of their geo-political power,
(since they can no longer challenge Russia and China militarily) the U.S. dollar, is on the
verge of collapse as the World's reserve currency. And the economic growth of China means
that China has become the most important trading partner for most of the World's nations.
The window of opportunity for the 'Globalists' to create their 'Global Governance' system
may have already closed. But, as usual, the losers of any war are usually the last to know.
The desperation with which the 'Globalists' are fighting their last battles, against Trump,
against Russia, against Brexit, is testimony to the fact that for the 'Globalists' losing
this war means their extinction as a ruling elite.
c'mon steve.... what is the usa offering
turkey here?? they could give a rats ass about turkey, or any other country in the middle
east, excluding their 24/7 darling israel... the usa presence on the world stage is meant to
sabotage any and all who don't bow down to the exceptional nations philosophy of 'might makes
right'... the obvious benefits of russia-china synergy are apparent to both countries and
they continue to capitalize on this, in spite of what you read in the usa msm.. russia as a
lot to offer china... the fact that the nation apparently masquerading as a gas station has
so much to offer is also the reason that all the pillage of the 90's hasn't turned out the
way the harvard boys had envisioned... that you can't see the vast wealth and value of russia
has nothing to do with the reality on the ground... keep the blinders on, lol...
The EU's attitude to the US is much like its attitude to Britain and Brexit. They don't want
to split with the US, because, after all, there might be war, and NATO would be needed, but
it's becoming increasingly less likely. In the same way, they would have preferred to stay in
good relations with Britain, until Britain insisted on a hostile Brexit. Basic interests come
first, and that will also be the case in the future with the US.
Russia and China are already de-facto alliance. Militarily they cooperate at every level
and will soon extend shared anti ballistic shield over China too. It is clear to any outside
enemy (except for most retarded ones) that nuclear attack on one will be treated as attack on
both of them. Not having formal alliance is somewhat an advantage (eg. limited attack on one
of them by enemy that can be easily handled will not complicate situation) as it controls
escalation. Lack of escalation control led to WW1 so...
Apart for military, Russia is one of rare fully self sufficient countries in the world.
Having vast natural resources and territory, knowledge and industrial capacity to built
EVERYTHING they need, they can afford to be sanctioned by whole world and close borders
completely if needed. Having 100% secure land borders with China and already huge (and
increasing) trade, including oil & gas, only make Russia's self sufficiency even more
stable. It also strategically benefits China, as its main weakness is lack of those same
resources Russia has in abundance and is willing to share.
So, if sh*t hits the fan, and Russia and China say f*ck it and close borders to rest of
the world (even though China trade profits wouldn't be happy), both countries form self
sufficient symbiosis that can carry on for centuries.
Which brings me to all those little fires US is starting in Russia's neighborhood. They
don't matter. Unlike USSR, Russia's mission is self preservation only, not changing whole
world into communist utopia (even though @VK here repeatedly fails to acknowledge it). And
survive it will. All it needs is to wait few generations.
Unlike Russia, collective west is going down the drain. Soon enough, all those Slav hating
in Bundestag, UK parlament and elsewhere will have more urgent problem of Islamic head
choppers that became majority in their countries, while US will have problem to recruit
enough men,women and "others" from pool of rainbow colored too-fat and unfit, godless faggot
from broken family snowflakes.
As China has been mentioned, I think it is worth saying that although I have full confidence
that Putin will maintain his usual good sense in international conflicts, I have more doubts
about the Chinese regime. I don't really understand their policy, which is becoming more
nationalistic and edgy. I don't see why. They have great economic success; they should be
more relaxed, but they aren't. The first signs came with their attitude towards the Muslims
in China. One, the concentration camps in Xinjiang - in that case the Uyghur jihadists in Syria
must have provoked anxiety in Beijing. But also increasing pressure on the Hui Muslims in
central China (who are native Han) to become more "national". Some years ago they weren't
bothered. Now they are.
This suggests that the question of Taiwan could blow up, apart from HongKong. They are
less tolerant in Beijing.
It is about driving a wedge between Europe and Russia. The nightmare scenario for the
Anglo-Americans is a Germany-Russia-China triangle. If that happens it is game
over!
It is a tired and false concept. There cannot be a "triangle" which includes Germany, due
to Germany's increasingly diminishing status. Moreover, Russians do not view Europe as a
viable part of Russia's future--the cultural gap is gigantic and continues to grow--the only
place of Europe in general, and Germany in particular, in Russian plans is that of a market
for Russia's hydrocarbons and other exports. A rather successful program of
export-substitution in Russia in the last 6 years dropped technological importance of Germany
for Russia dramatically. In some fields, such as high-power turbines made Germany irrelevant,
as Siemens learned the hard way recently.
"U.S. and its EU puppies have ratcheted up their pressure...
The 'rules of the liberal international order' are of course whatever the U.S. claims they
are. They may change at any moment and without notice to whatever new rules are the most
convenient for U.S. foreign policy."
Outstanding assessment and thank you for addressing it.
As I've said numerous times -- Fuck the US Empire and it's minion bitches. Jesse Ventura
commented this past week that EVERY US Incumbent politician should be voted out of office
this election. 99% of them are scum.
Every politician, corporate CEO Banker and Media whore, Judge, CIA filth should have a
pitchfork held to their throat and be tried for treason and war crimes. MIC/Pentagon should
be destroyed. Majority of Americans are propagandized dumbfucks. Sounds a bit like an
American Cultural Revolution is exactly the medicine.
There will come a day for reckoning and true justice, hopefully it is sooner than later.
There should be no mercy. For those committing their treasonous crimes, they know better but
have chosen poorly, they should be broken.
Russia, Putin and Lavrov have remained the adults in the room while the Empire Brats
tantrum themselves.
Anyone else notice that the Anti-Russia rhetoric increased after Snowden was trapped in
Russia?
I agree with Ike and others who think the US money situation is the problem. But I also
think that the underlying endpoint is hyperinflation, not just the loss of the dollars'
"reserve status." Hyperinflation is when so much "money" has been produced that it no longer
has any value and the Central Bank cannot control what comes next.
There is a point at which people want to get rid of dollars and panic buy or "invest" in
assets, or anything solid or simply anything (Gold, land etc. bread) At which time the money
they want to get rid of looses value continuously, as others don't want it either. A Rush for
the exits happens.
Who has the MOST money - the Rich and the sovereign Nations? (Althought the latter may
also be in the same situation as the US.) Russia has more or less got rid of all it's US
holdings. The Chinese must be alarmed by the thought of the Fed issuing ONLY new-digicoins,
and then the US simply refusing to pay debts to the Chinese at some future point. They might
want out now. Not so much dumping everything but a steady reduction of US denominated
"assets" or reserves.
Most of this becomes self-sustaining panic, as happened in the Weimar Rep. What can be
considered "assets" to grab? ie Russia, minerals and it's Gold, China and its Gold. Then the
choice might be to invest in the US military and use it while there is a residue of belief in
the Dollar.
The only thing about a panic exit is that it happens very quickly. About a month or two
between when the first bright sparks try to get out and when everyone else tries to grab part
of a rapidly restricted choice of things to buy with an unending pile of "empty" dollars.
Germany should've been conquered by the Soviet Union entirely as it was won with Soviet,
largely Russian, blood. Germany is increasingly irrelevant to Russia's needs now as Martyanov
points out above. Germany's existence today should be that of a Russian oblast, same with
Eastern Ukraine from Kharkiv to Mariupol and Belarus.
Ask yourself what Germany produces that Russia can't produce for itself with import
substitution schemes or similar schemes within a 10 year period. Russia's GDP by PPP is the
size of Germany's already and depending on how it deals with the impact of COVID, may
continue an upward year-on-year growth trend (People's Republic of China is the only major
economy forecast to expand in fiscal quarter this year). The fact of the matter is that
Russia's population is much larger, its industrial base, at least in heavy industry, is
nearly self sufficient (not much light industry to speak of) and Germany depends on Russian
oil and gas to keep its lights on. Russia can carry on without Germany just fine. There may
be a noticeable impact now if Russia were cornered into doing that, but it's nothing that
can't be overcome in short order.
Thank you, b, and before reading comments, I will give my take on your last question:
As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure
campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?
The whole 'rules based order' became very clear when the Trans Pacific Partnership, TPP,
was being debated,and what happened then is what many have noted, the 'rules' were all to
advantage the US. So, you might say that was the beginning of the end for the oligarchy. And
the partnership reformed after it had taken out that problem, to be fair to all participants.
All the oligarchy can do is keep on keeping on until it can't. This is really about survival
for that class of individuals who intend to keep on being in charge here in the US and
wherever its tentacles have reached. The only endpoint they see is their continuance. And I
suppose their fear is that it is simply not possible for that to be the case.
Hopefully there will just come a point where, as in Plato's Republic, the dialogue simply
moves on. There, it begins in the home of the ancient one, Cephalus, with a polite
discussion, and the old man says his piece, to which Socrates responds:
"What you say is very fine indeed, Cephalus...but as to this very thing, justice, shall
we so simply assert that it is the truth and giving back what a man has taken from another,
or is to do these very things sometimes just and sometimes unjust? Take this case as an
example of what I mean: everyone would surely say that if a man takes weapons from a friend
when the latter is of sound mind, and the friend demands them back when he is mad, one
shouldn't give back such things, and the man who gives them back would not be just, and
moreover, one should not be willing to tell someone in this state the whole truth."
"What you say is right," he said.
[Allan Bloom translation]
In the dialogue, the old man leaves to 'look after the sacrifices', handing down the
argument to his heir, Polymarchus. To me, Socrates has adroitly caused this to come about in
much the fashion that Lavrov answers his press questioners in the link b provides. That is,
he has done so with diplomacy, and a lesson to his younger companions which perhaps Cephalus
is no longer able to understand. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Yet in your disparaging comments of Europe and Germany in particular you proceed to show
how successful the Anglo-Americans have been in creating a wedge between Europe and Russia
actually validating my original point.
"Keep the Russians out, the Germans down and the US in"
That was the whole point of the first Cold War. It is the whole point of creating a Cold War 2.0. Absolutely nothing has changed.
By whom exactly? US & several euro puppets? Typical racist thinking that Europe and
its former colonies are somehow "the world" or "the international community".
Meanwhile opinion of Russia is positive in India (1,3 billion people, more than the whole
West combined) and China (1,4 billion, more than the whole West combined).
Those who don't spend for their own weapons, spend for their master's weapons (like
europuppets).
Btw your master (US) spends on weapons too. What are you going to do about it?
As was rightly pointed out in that discussion, British foreign policy towards Europe was
to ensure that no single power was to be allowed to achieve hegemony over Europe. The famous
"balance of power"
@ Posted by: Andrei Martyanov | Oct 17 2020 19:41 utc | 36
If the Russian Federation really has an ongoing imports substitution program, then this
explains everything. Germany is an exports-oriented economy. It wants to integrate with the Russian economy in
the sense to keep it as an agrarian-extrativist economy to feed it with cheap commodities to
feed their industry. Germany's ideal Russia is Brazil.
A Russia that also exports high-value commodities (manufactured commodities) is a direct
threat to Germany, as it competes with it directly in the international market. That's the
reason Germany doesn't want the BRI to come to Europe, as Merkel once said: Europe must not
become China's peninsula. China is Germany's main competitor, as it is also a big
manufacturing exporter.
Unlike China, Russia lacks the weight of population and reliance on the globalist capitalist
system to throw around, China will not shut itself up for Russia when it can trade with EU
& Turkey instead.
Russia is increasingly put into weak position, where Russian troops are sent to do the
dying, while the Chinese business whoop in afterwards to get all the juicy business deals. In
other words, Russia does the dying while China enriches itself.
Russia only hope is that it becomes friendly with the EU, otherwise, it is going to be
crushed between two superpowers, the EU and China.
I think the point of the sanctions and all the pressure on Russia is an appeal to Russian
elite, Just a reminder that they are isolated from the rest of the elite and hope that it
would help them throw Russian nationalists from power. I think this might succeed as Putin
did no really take on the new Russian capitalist class, and that will probably be his
undoing.
@vk 36 That's the reason Germany doesn't want the BRI to come to Europe
BRI in Europe - 16 countries:
Austria*, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Italy,
Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Ukraine
* shaky
SCMP - Aug 17, 2020:
China's rail shipments to Europe set records as demand surges for Chinese goods amid
coronavirus
> July saw 1,232 cargo trains travel from Chinese cities to European destinations –
the most ever in a single month > Once regarded as merely ornamental, freight service along belt and road trade routes has
become increasingly important as exporters turn to railway transport. . .
here
Lavrov, Shoigu and Putin are calm, but the domestic economic situation is not.
While I have noted before that Russia is better positioned to survive low oil prices than
Saudi Arabia - it doesn't mean this is fun.
Couple that with COVID-19 economic losses, and stresses on the domestic Russian economy are
enormous.
Among other signs: after bouncing around in the 60s for some time, the ruble just hit 80 to
the USD. Anecdotally, I am hearing a lot of direct personal accounts of businesses not being
able to pay their people because their own customers aren't paying.
Russia has done relatively little extra to assist with COVID-19 related economic harms, so
this isn't great either.
@ laguerre -- The interview with Pepe Escobar deals with the whole range of issues in the
hybrid war against China, but the information you're looking for Regarding the suppression
and re-education of Muslim terrorists starts just past the 1-hour point.
the Chinese regime. I don't really understand their policy, which is becoming more
nationalistic and edgy.
No, it's become more multi-national and sensible. Take the BRI: Launched in 2013, it was
initially planned to revive ancient Silk Road trade routes between Eurasia and China, but the
scope of the BRI (Belt & Road Initiative) has since extended to cover 138 countries,
including 38 in sub-Saharan Africa and 18 in Latin America and the Caribbean.
they should be more relaxed
China has been an open target for the US, which doesn't even mention China any more (Pompeo)
but dumps on the "CCP" (Chinese Communist Party). China (like Russia) has not responded in
kind.
their attitude towards the Muslims in China
The US State Dept slash CIA has been fomenting terrorism in Xinjiang for years and China has
had to contend with it.
the question of Taiwan could blow up
Taiwan like some other places in the world, including Hong Kong, has been another place where
the US has fomented instability. This has increased recently with Taiwan "president" Tsai
declaring that Taiwan (January this year, BBC interview) is a separate country, which it
isn't. China is being pushed to do his Abe Lincoln thing and save the union.
They are less tolerant in Beijing
Chinese by nature are tolerant, and Beijing has been tolerant in the face of US naval fleets
and bomber visits in their near seas, plus political attacks, sanctions and tariffs.
66 watch what they do and have done and not what they.
Construction started four years ago on enlarging and modernization of the railway marshaling
yards in Duisburg.
The volume of Chinese freight trains arriving daily is already quite amazing and planned to
increase to one every hour next month 24/7.They are not returning empty. The oil and gas
pipeline corridors also had ten plus railway tracks built alongside .Germany is already at the
center of the BRI expansion into Germany and it started four years ago.
@ Posted by: H.Schmatz | Oct 17 2020 21:40 utc | 60
That's why Germany is not full anti-China.
--//--
@ Posted by: Don Bacon | Oct 17 2020 22:12 utc | 66
Just because Germany doesn't want it, it doesn't mean it's not getting.
--//--
@ Posted by: c1ue | Oct 17 2020 22:18 utc | 67
I agree. Capitalism is a dead end for Russia. It's all about when Putin dies. After he dies, it will be a coin flip for Russia: it could
continue its course or it could get another Yeltsin.
Germany being against BRI is news to me. Any proof? And it is very unlikely that China will be able to fool the europeans lile the
american. The EU has regulations and aren't purely about profit.
Perhaps the US only has one script in the playbook: to balkanise, disrupt and foster 5th
columns until their opponent becomes a dysfunctional or failed state. Then send in the
acronyms (IMF etc), establish a provisional administration under trusted local elites but
commandeer resource-rich areas under direct provincial command. That's US imperialism and it
won't stop until they encounter opposition effective enough to resist it. That's why they'll
never forgive Putin for Syria. In the end they want to finish doing to Russia (by other
means...) what the Germans began in '41; and not just Russia, but anywhere their markets are
prevented from calling the shots.
thank you, @72. the chinese learned much from their century of humiliation & clearly one
of the important lessons was trade both ways, rather than take their silver, sell them tea,
silks & porcelain & need nothing they offered.
That's an excellent observation, and a concept I had not encountered before. Thank you.
How consciously China holds that narrative, if at all, I couldn't say.
But it's a great dynamic - kind of like keeping your enemies close. And if the German
increase in reciprocal railroad trade with China is as it was stated up-thread, it would seem
to be working.
@78, thank you, grieved...i've long admired you. in times such as these it can be a challenge
to keep sight of the positive but as china prospers & wishes her trading partners to as
well, & so long as russia continues to strive toward the high road rather than descend to
the barroom floor perhaps we can also learn to rise...i'm reminded of a sufi saying: 'rise in
love do not fall'. may we all.
Do they even think about an endpoint? Is it really on their radar?
Or is this all being done because they are spoilt, and are throwing a tantrum because they
aren't getting their way?
I assume that there are sober heads in the Pentagon that wargame possible "endpoints". If
not sober at the beginning then sober when the results play out to their bitter end.
Or... maybe not. Post-retirement board seats are at stake, dammit! Full steam ahead and
damn the torpedoes!
I'm truly astonished that you don't know the truth of Xinjaing - in sum, that the
concentration camps are a huge lie that can be revealed as such by any satellite, and that
China has developed a progressive and worthy solution to the foreign-provoked terrorism
within its border.
Fortunately, Qiao Collective, a great expert source on China, has recently compiled a
treasure trove of links to know the truth:
Based on a handful of think tank reports and witness testimonies, Western governments
have levied false allegations of genocide and slavery in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
A closer look makes clear that the politicization of China's anti-terrorism policies in
Xinjiang is another front of the U.S.-led hybrid war on China.
This resource compilation provides a starting point for critical inquiry into the
historical context and international response to China's policies in Xinjiang, providing a
counter-perspective to misinformation that abounds in mainstream coverage of the autonomous
region.
Posted by: Andrei Martyanov | Oct 17 2020 19:41 utc | 36
Andrei
A good justification on Russian German transitional relation, and we hope Russia is not
fooled again, by hopes. Those of us who hope for containing and reducing western dominance
over the world affairs, politics and economy, hope that Russians have learned from their
experience of the 90's joining G7, seat at NATO, joining western sanctions on smaller powers,
etc. all those efforts were the carrots thrown at Russia to tame the bear, one would think up
to Georgian war, it worked, that war perhaps woke the bear. Russians felt they are part of
Europe,part of western community of privileged nations (first world) but all that was a decoy
to move the NATO to Russian borders. I hope Russians once for all have learned, as long as
they have a big modern military and plenty of energy resources that is not under the western
(you read US) control they will never be accepted as a "western" country, Ironically, Russia
is the largest European country.
As a strategist you know better than most to circumvent western power and to bring back
the rule of international law, it would be impossible without having the Russian defensive
political and military power (as in Syria) on the side of resistance. We just hope you are
right Russia, will not be bought out again. IMO as you say, is just impossible for Germany,
or even France to decouple from the US grip on europe.
Seems to me its been terribly effective.
Russian economy pretty weak heavily reliant on raw materials, fracturing at the periphery.
China and Russia seem less than alies.
Seems US has Germany, France by the short hairs.
US had to bail them out in 2009.
Europe is having some problems with solvency and cohesion - whats a bureaucrat to do?
Its not really about the sovereigns, that's only for appearances.
@ 77
The Century of Humiliation from 1842 to 1949 and the contemporary discourse around it are a
driving narrative of contemporary Chinese history, foreign policy, and militarization of its
surrounding regions like the South China Sea. The expansion of the Chinese navy in numbers,
mission, and aggression is directly fueled by China's previous weakness and exploitation at
the hands of western nations. . . .
here
The US economy is definitely in trouble, but the US has spent roughly $2 trillion this year
to help its economy = a bit under 10% of 2019 GDP.
The difference is structural. The US economy is a service one - and lockdowns are literally
the best way to damage it.
The Russian economy is still heavily dependent on natural gas and oil sales. Despite the
initial devaluation, ongoing low oil prices plus increasing competition in natural gas (for
example, Azerbaijan is now selling natural gas to Italy) is hurting its economy.
Nor has Russia spent much to compensate for COVID-19 losses beyond its existing health and
social safety nets - the Russian plan was $73B / 5 trillion rubles = 4.3% of 2019 GDP.
I am anti-war and I am an anti-war crimes liberal (examples of war crimes: ethnic cleansing,
proof of genocide, torture, collective punishment via deprivation and occupation of
dispossessed land). Yet, I am also a non-interventionist except in extreme circumstances but
I am against regime change for the sake of neutralizing competing powers or converting them
religiously or politically.
All this implies exercising the highest integrity and blocking out all external influence
and pressure if one is a true liberal, and relying solely on conscience and wisdom.
Therefore, I don't like the term liberal sullied and usurped by fake liberals,
neoliberals and Zionist liberals, and I also take offense to the way liberal as a
general term is denigrated in this article.
Germany is an exports-oriented economy. It wants to integrate with the
Russian economy in the sense to keep it as an agrarian-extrativist economy to feed it with
cheap commodities to feed their industry. Germany's ideal Russia is Brazil.
True, it was about 10 years ago. Economic reality, of course, is such that Germany already
beat the record by consecutive 20 months of real economy shrinkage. In general, Germany's
energy policy is suicidal and Russia is increasingly independent from imports.
A lot to be
done in the future yet, of course, but as the whole comedy with high-power turbines and
Siemens demonstrated, Russia can do it on her own, plus General Electric is always there,
sanctions or no sanctions. It is a complicated matter, but it is Germany which increasingly
becomes irrelevant for Russia as an old image of technologically-advanced Germans getting
their hands on Russia's resources and ruling the world--this image is utterly obsolete,
completely false and doesn't correspond to the reality "on the ground".
It is really a simple
thing which many Westerners cannot wrap their brains around, that the country which has a
space program which operates ISS and second fully operational global satellite navigation
constellation, or which produces hypersonic weapons and whose shipbuilding dwarfs that of
Germany will have relatively little troubles in developing other crucial industries and
removing Western interests from those. Simple as that.
@90 Very true. Every time I read someone proclaiming that the Russian economy is no bigger
than Italy's, or Spain's, or ..... (fill in the blanks) I simply think to myself: "This word,
I do not think it means what you think it means".
Because it should be obvious to everyone that Italy can not produce all the things that
Russia produces.
Equally, Spain can not produce all the things that Russia produces.
So if someone has measured "economy" in such a way that the numbers for Russia are the
same as the number for Italy - or Spain - is simply admitting that their economic models are
flawed.
The US and EU attempts to break Russia's independent foreign policy are just stepping stones
to the eventual goal of a breakup Russia itself, never forget Albright's comments in the 90s
about how Siberia shouldn't belong to Russia alone.
Ultimately, though the US and EU nation
states are nothing more than tools of the globalist elite whose dream of a fully economically
integrated world where the power of labour is completely crushed by the power of capital to
move instantly across the planet is already falling apart. The economic elite have already
pillaged all of the minor nations in the world and the two grand prizes, Russia and China are
too powerful to attack directly now. unable to control their unbridled greed they've begone
the process of auto-self cannibalism, destroying their own states (or killing their hosts as
Michael Huddson would say) in order to completely centralize all capital within the 0.1%.
This will make them very rich, however hundreds of millions of Americans, Australians,
Canadians, Japanese and Europeans will be impoverished in order to do this. When this is
eventually realized by the majority of the people in these states, the economic elite will be
lucky if they "just" lose everything but their lives in mass nationalization campaigns. I see
very little evidence that the Russian or Chinese states would be willing to offer safe harbour for the criminal oligarchs of the West, like London has offered to criminal Oligarchs
fleeing justice in Russia
Before posting here monetarist propaganda BS form Western "economic" sources learn to
distinguish monetary expression of product and actual product in terms of quantity and
quality.
Just to demonstrate to you: for $100,000 in a desirable place in the US you will be
able to buy a roach-infested shack in a community known for meth-labs and high crime, for
exactly the same money in Russia you will buy a superb brand-new house in a desirable
location.
To demonstrate even more, for a price of a single Columbia-class SSBN ($8 billion+)
which does not exist other than on paper yet, Russia financed and produced her 8-hulls state
of the strategic missile submarines.
UK economy is dwarfed by Russia even in accordance by
IMF and World Bank, in fact, it is, once one excludes still relevant RR and few other
manufacturers, is down right third world economy. I am not going to post here all data from
IMF, but even this can explain why you posted a BS. Anyone "counting" real economic sector in
USD and Nominal GDP has to have head examined and is probably dumbed down through "economics"
programs in Western madrasas, aka universities.
In related news, learn what Composite Index of National Capability (CINC) is and check
energy consumption and production of Germany and Russia, just for shits and giggles.
And of course, Martyanov @96 is absolutely correct - the relative values of currencies are
proved to be nothing more than the entries of bookkeepers and bankers, all "sound and fury,
signifying nothing." What matters is what the home unit of currency will buy at home.
A better question is as Andrei suggests, what does it cost for Russia to produce something
that works, as opposed to what it costs the US to produce something that doesn't work because
of theft and cost inflation in the delivery chain?
The ultimate - MAD - question that the US should ask itself is this: How much does it
cost Russia to destroy the US, compared with the cost involved for the US to destroy
Russia?
~~
The cost of living is higher in the US. The cost of doing anything is higher. But none of
that means the quality of the result is greater - I certainly don't hear anyone lately saying
the living is good, compared to what people pay for it.
Were it not for the nerves of steel of Mr. Putin and his close advisers, the
irresponsible pressure policies outlined above could result in aggressive behavior and risk
taking by Russia that would make the Cuban missile crisis look like child's play.
We may yet see a Cuban missile crisis scenario but it looks more likely to be caused by arms
sales to Taiwan than conflict in the Caucasus.
I also think its naive to see these as "fires burning at Russia's borders" instead of as
deliberately set bear traps . Azerbaijan is in a strategic location between Russia and
Iran and the conflict with Armenia comes just before Russia is about to sell advanced weapons
to Iran.
Jacques Chirac President of France told Jr Bush if the United States finds WMDs in Iraq
you put them there. The CIA and MI6 knew Iraq had no WMDs because Tariq Aziz Saddam's long
time number 2 was a CIA asset. Back in the 1980s Aziz was a regular on the Washington
cocktail party circuit and a frequent guest on CNNs Crossfire with Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak
vs Tom Braden and Michael Kinsley. Finally Dick Armey Republican and House Majority leader
was going to vote against authorizing the war in the fall of 2002. Cheney goes up to Capitol
Hill pulls Armey into the Vice Presidents office in the Capitol and tells him that Iraq is
close to having suitcase nukes and has very close ties to Osama bin Laden. Both lies of
course.
On one occasion when Jr Bush was talking to Chirac he told him that the war on terror is
Biblical prophecy. Needless to say Chirac was stunned. Yes the Republican establishment lied
the country into one of the biggest foreign policy blunders in our history. Almost as bad as
Woodrow Wilson taking us into World war 1 which led to the rise Bolshevik revolution and Nazi
Germany
Vietnam was bad for sure and had a much larger death count, but the region or the domino
theory never materialized. The Middle East has been in chaos ever since our invasion and
occupation of Iraq
Jacques Chirac President of France told Jr Bush if the United States finds WMDs in Iraq you
put them there. The CIA and MI6 knew Iraq had no WMDs because Tariq Aziz Saddam's long time
number 2 was a CIA asset. Back in the 1980s Aziz was a regular on the Washington cocktail party
circuit and a frequent guest on CNNs Crossfire with Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak vs Tom Braden
and Michael Kinsley. Finally Dick Armey Republican and House Majority leader was going to vote
against authorizing the war in the fall of 2002. Cheney goes up to Capitol Hill pulls Armey
into the Vice Presidents office in the Capitol and tells him that Iraq is close to having
suitcase nukes and has very close ties to Osama bin Laden. Both lies of course.
On one occasion when Jr Bush was talking to Chirac he told him that the war on terror is
Biblical prophecy. Needless to say Chirac was stunned. Yes the Republican establishment lied
the country into one of the biggest foreign policy blunders in our history. Almost as bad as
Woodrow Wilson taking us into World war 1 which led to the rise Bolshevik revolution and Nazi
Germany
Vietnam was bad for sure and had a much larger death count, but the region or the
domino theory never materialized. The Middle East has been in chaos ever since our
invasion and occupation of Iraq
Britain created Saudi Arabia? They supported the westernized Hashemites rivals of the
Saud to the hilt. Just one of the many factual errors in a muddle-headed article that seems
to draw its inspiration from the reflexive anti-Americanism of the European loony left.
The Caucasus, like the former Yugoslavia, or India before partition, is made up of many
populations coexisting. When ethno- or religious nationalism rears its ugly head, violence
and ethnic cleansing inevitably ensue. The Armenians prevailed militarily due to
Azerbaijani incompetence, not because of any intrinsic moral righteousness, but the thing
about military gains is they can be reversed when the other side gets its act together,
specially if it enjoys an overwhelming advantage in population and resources.
Foreign powers like Russia, Turkey, Iran, France or Israel are pouring oil on the fires
of revanchism for political or mercantile reasons, instead of pushing both sides to
meaningful negotiations (let's not forget the Armenians are perfectly happy with the status
quo and have not exactly been eager to negotiate it away). The last thing the US should be
doing is taking sides, and since this is Russia's backyard there is not much we can do
other than pressuring Turkey to stop making things worse, but we all know how little real
sway we have with Erdögan.
The article seems to me to be disjointed and I have feeling the damage was done during
editing. There's no egregious mistake is saying the Brits created "Saudi" Arabia. That is a
historical fact and which family/tribe they supported is irrelevant in historical terms.
Your charge of "reflexive anti-Americanism of the European loony left." because of a few
inaccuracies in the article is way off the wall. The article is badly written but it is
informative.
Regarding your claim, "Foreign powers like Russia, Turkey, Iran, France or Israel are
pouring oil on the fires...", I agree with you with the exception of Iran's role in this
mess. The very first official announcement by the IRI, which I posted to another article on
the site, warned Turkey is pouring fuel to the file. There's no disagreement there. Iran
has no military personnel nor funding going to either country. Azerbaijan has about 700
Kilometers of common border with Iran, and Armenia shares about 32 Kilometers of borders
with Iran. Iran has a substantial, vibrant and patriotic Azari population. Many are in top
IRI leadership including Khamenei. Iran also has a very substantial and vibrant Armenian
population. Iran does recognize the Turk's genocide of its Armenian population. Iran is
connected to Armenia via oil and gas pipelines, as well as power grids. Iran is the most
important of energy supplier for Armenia.
A bit of recent history will shed some light on Iran's behavior and attitude towards
each country. While Armenia remained one of Iran's stalwart neighbors, Azerbaijan took the
path of endearing itself to the US and Israel axis of war mongering and destabilizing
policies. This put Azerbaijan on Iran's list of "unfriendly" governments, I'm not talking
about Azerbaijan's Shia population in this context. There's nothing for Iran in this war.
Therefore Iran's latest announcement is to end the war as soon as possible through
diplomatic means. The shells and missiles have started landing on Iranian soil but no
casualties fortunately.
The British had literally nothing to do with the creation of Saudi Arabia.
Abdulaziz Ibn Saud took back his family fief of Riyadh in 1901 from the rival al-Rashid of
Ha'il, then waged war over the other tribes of Arabia, enlisting a fanatical proto-ISIS
like militia called the Ikhwan to conquer in 1924 the British-supported Hejaz ruled by
Sharif Hussein of the Hashemite dynasty. He did not extend his conquests to Yemen, Oman,
Kuwait or Transjordan and Syria because that would have meant waging direct war on the
British and French empires, and in fact had to quell a rebellion of the Ikhwan who wanted
to do exactly that.
The Saudis draw great pride in being the one nation in the Middle East that was not
colonized by Western powers (mostly because it was worthless until the discovery of oil).
Just because William Shakespear or Gertrude Bell toured the region does not make the
al-Saud British puppets like the Hashemites were, whatever their many faults. While
Abdulaziz bided his time and tactically made treaties with the British like temporarily
accepting a protectorate status or agreeing to fight the al-Rashid (like he would do
otherwise, they being his family's hereditary enemies....), they never provided him with
any significant assistance, and in fact tried ineffectually to contain his rise.
I think if we remove "Saudi" from the discussion and just talk about "Arabia" our
difference of opinion will evaporate. The country is mistakenly, in my opinion, was named
"Saudi Arabia" for the Western colonizers' special interest. The rest of your argument
about who did what to whom in Arabia is inside baseball to me.
By the way, stay tuned. We many start hearing about the al-Rashid as soon as the "king"
passes and mBS tries be big cheese of Arabia.
Of course Iran would just like the conflict to go away; its leaving them with only bad
choices, whether that to be appearing to support Azerbaijan and alienating Armenia, with
whom they have an important relationship, or appearing to support Armenia and alienating
much of its local Azeri population. I think Iran publicly is walking a fine line and trying
to stress diplomacy to solve the conflict as much as possible, though its still hard for
them to extricate themselves from the politics of the situation.
Though, in that regard, its a bit wrong to compare the Azeri population in Iran to the
Armenian population; its completely different in scale and importance. Iran has some
concern that the Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict, if handled wrongly, would become regional or
spill over into their borders, and they're less concerned about Armenia in that part.
Also wrong to not point out that Israel formed ties with Azerbaijan and Iran formed ties
with Armenia around the same time; these were complementary moves, and its just as possible
to explain Israel's ties with Azerbaijan as being as a result of Iran's ties with Armenia,
rather than just the reverse. Just as well, Israel at the time had friendly relations with
Turkey, which have since deteriorated. Its also true that the relationships are based on
reasons independent of those kind of geopolitical moves, and are largely based on
self-interest on both sides. Azerbaijan is also Israel's top oil supplier. Simply blaming
all this on the US and Israel, and making Iran's stance towards Azerbaijan as a result of
them being the victim of these types of deals, is a bit much.
I doesn't seem Iran can or even thinks about extricate herself from "the situation".
Iran is situated right there and whether things spill over to Iran or not will play a big
role in Iran's perception of the regional security.
No sure where I inferred any comparison between the Azari and the Armenian population of
Iran. They are BOTH Iranians. After the breakup of the USSR, the Azerbaijani dictator
Heydar Aliyev established relation with Israel and later the US, while refusing to join any
of the several post-Soviet economic arrangements. That was accompanied by Azerbaijan making
noises about "unification" of Azerbaijan. That pushed Iran to throw all its support behind
Armenia then. The situation has changed and IRI and Azerbaijan have normal relations.
Iran cannot simple afford to consider the Armenian Iranians less "important" than her
Azeri Iranians, if that's where you are going.
The author may have been a banker, but he clearly was neither an historian or diplomat.
He knows neither the details of what he writes, nor does he have a framework.
The decision to assign Karabakh to Azerbaijan was taken in 1921, not 1923 and was taken
by the Bolshevik Caucasus Bureau, not by Stalin. General clashes between Azerbaijanis and
Armenians took place in 1905, and the fighting for Karabakh proper erupted in 1918 with the
formation of independent Armenian and Azerbaijan republics. Both well before the Bolsheviks
or Stalin could do anything about Karabakh (although the Bolsheviks did join with the
Armenian Dashnaks in March 1918 to seize Baku and butcher Azerbaijanis in the process. Yes,
Azerbaijanis retaliated in September, but the Armenians did start it and got their hands
plenty bloody, outside Baku as well).
The author's contempt for Azerbaijanis comes through in his comment that the
Azerbaijanis have lost every time against the Armenians. He never reflects that the
possible reason might be that the Armenians have been both better organized and more
aggressive than the Azerbaijanis. He deliberately leaves out that Armenian expelled 800,000
Azerbaijanis from the territories surrounding Karabakh. He is stunning in his
disingenuousness and ignorance. As for his framework, he has none. Where does he get the
idea that Kosovo and Karabakh are interlinked and that they can be resolved through
tradeoffs? Does he imagine that Muslims are one people and constitute a single union?
Apparently.
An Arab world moving toward Pan-Arabism and socialism in 1924?!
As to the "Armenian settlement area" – the author might reflect on the Kurds'
claims to 90% of that same area, and the bloody history of Kurdish-Armenian relations. If
turning over old borders what do you do about Abkhazia, Circassia, and multiple places in
the Balkans from where Muslims were expelled. Bring Greeks back into Turkey, too, while we
are it? This article was not analysis, but uninformed blathering laced with ethnic
invective. The Armenians have suffered enough to deserve such shoddy argumentation. AmCon
should be ashamed to have run this.
Turkey regularly threatens Europe with opening the gates with their "refugees" as
leverage in negotiations. Erdogan travels to the heart of Europe to encourage the Turkish
diaspora to perpetuate their grudges on European soil and encourage them to flex their
political muscle to further an Islamist agenda. They slaughtered Armenians, Greeks, and
Syriac Christians- never acknowledging the crime or showing remorse. Now they seek to
finish what they started with the Armenian Genocide- and the world sits on its hands
claiming that both sides are equally responsible.
This is outrageous! Turkey has proved time and time again that it is the aggressor,
using threats to get what it wants, and does not behave as an ally. Turkey has
single-handily destabilized entire countries in its dream of Neo-Ottoman domination over
the region. Time to heavily militarize the Greek- Turkish frontier, kick Turkey out of
NATO, and put it on notice that it's adventurism in Libya, Syria, and Armenia will be met
overwhelming force. Feeble responses made by the West will only encourage the mad-dog
Erdogan.
Explains well why Biden spent the other day criticizing the President for not taking a
more active role in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. Warmongers gonna warmonger. I assume
that's one of the main attractions for Biden's supporters - more dead women and children in
Asia. They spent eight years driving around with "Support America's Foreign Invasions"
yellow ribbon stickers on their SUVs under the last administration Biden was part of.
With not a new war for nearly four years, I can understand why the establishment and
Democrat voters are pissed. At least the fake "neoconservatives" are back in the party they
belong in.
War mongering is like Herpes. You can suppress it, but it's virus never goes away. Biden
has had it for years. He supported W's war of choice in Iraq, which led to the carnage of
thousands of American 20-somethings, thousands of mental illness sufferers and MILLIONS of
dead Iraqi people of ALL ages. He is an unrepentant old neo-con war criminal.
The liberals are rubbing their hands with glee. They told us it wouldn't last, that it would
never take a hold and that, in the end, everyone would see things
their way . But the idea that right-wing populism is dead is both misguided and premature.
Because the bugbear of Europe's political elite is actually stronger than ever.
Sure, the faces we associate with populism, such as Italy's Matteo Salvini and the UK's
Nigel Farage, may not be plastered all over our newspapers or television screens like they were
just a year or two ago, but the reason for that is the ideas they represented and trumpeted
across the European political stage have taken root.
One issue at the heart of right-wing populism has been immigration and, while the pandemic
has hijacked the national conversation and political debate in most quarters, the policies, the
language and the rhetoric surrounding that very much on-the-menu issue right now are pure
populism.
Twelve months ago, no British Conservative politician who valued their job, however radical,
would have dreamt of airing ideas about processing immigrants on disused ferries in the middle
of the English Channel, or sending
refugees to windswept outposts in the Atlantic until we could figure out what to do with
them.
But these off-the-wall ideas, talk of a points-based visa system, swamping dinghies packed
with illegal immigrants with wave machines and calling in the Royal Navy to stop the flow of
asylum seekers onto Britain's southern beaches, would not have looked out of
place at a Farage-led UKIP conference five years ago.
Back then, this sort of talk was condemned by everyone in the establishment as vile racism
from swivel-eyed
loons and fruitcakes. Nowadays, these go-to solutions from Priti Patel – the hardline
Home Secretary and the daughter of immigrants herself – are deemed blue-sky thinking.
Meanwhile, in France, no one ever talks of Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National as some
right-wing, fly-by-night populist set-up, despite her tendency to change policies as often as
her smartly tailored suits, depending on the public mood.
For those looking for an alternative to President Macron and his En Marche party, Le Pen is
the only game in town, and while the electoral system does her no favours in failing to aid her
attempts at reaching the Élysée Palace, were she to get there, she carries a
guaranteed swag of right-wing
votes , which would gift her a central role in deciding who takes the top job.
The Italians have their own populist bad-ass in Matteo Salvini. Although he and his Lega
Nord party were all over the media last year, the catastrophic effect that coronavirus has had
on Italy, particularly in his heartland to the north, has impacted that.
After Italians witnessed, on the television news, military trucks carting piles of
corpses away from mortuaries, it was always going to be difficult for the charismatic
leader to maintain his impetus and keep his key issue, migration, in the spotlight.
But it's not just Covid-19 that has made life difficult for Salvini – there's a new
kid on the block. The genuinely far-right Brothers of Italy are now competing for the same
hearts and minds that once belonged to the Lega Nord, and they're toying with the same issues
and successfully providing an alternative.
As Professor Kai Arzheimer, a political scientist at Mainz University, in Germany, points
out, debunking the entire Financial Times piece dedicated to the purported collapse of populism
in which he's quoted: "The overall support among voters for the right wing has not
diminished. It is just being spread among a larger number of actors. To talk about the end of
populism might be somewhat premature." And those healthy populist movements in Spain,
Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere are proof of that.
The liberal idea that populism thrives only in times when things are going well, and that
people look to the establishment parties when things are tough is an over-simplification. You
could argue that demanding times call for more creative thinking and a recognition that doing
things the old way no longer works, and that exploring fresh ideas is the best way forward.
One thing Covid-19 has shown us is that relying on old orthodoxies in dealing with a global
health crisis does not work. The universal mishandling of the pandemic by those we have put in
power to help us through nightmares such as this has destroyed public trust in the usual way of
doing things. And that's precisely why populism thrives and is unlikely to disappear anytime
soon – despite the wishes of liberals in denial.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
The Baron 10 hours ago The damage is already
done to Europe by the mass immigration of (mostly) undesirable elements who are unwilling to
make a honest living there. I think we're at a point where a "right-wing" party entering the
government in some minor form isn't enough any more, there needs to be major political upheaval
- which will most likely only occur if normal citizens organize and stand up against the
current corrupt marxist/globalist/whatever forces that have their claws in the power structure
of the West. Only then can they start rebuilding their countries and cultures. GreekGuy 10
hours ago Crosstalk on Monday, 12 Oct was very good. George Szamuely was on the show and he was
talking about his hypothesis on how the liberal elites are using the corona virus as a means of
strangling populism. A very interesting talk.
Tom Fowdyis a British writer and analyst of politics and international relations
with a primary focus on East Asia.
His Holiness declining to meet the US secretary of state when he visited the Vatican on his
European tour further proves that his misguided America-first chauvinism is alienating more
nations than it's winning as friends.
Pompeo, everyone's favourite Cold Warrior and American chauvinist,
is on a European tour . Visiting Greece, Italy, Croatia, and notably, the Vatican, the
secretary of state is on a roll to win support for American security and energy interests
across the region. But he wasn't welcomed by all. Attending the Holy See today, the US' 'top
diplomat' found himself
snubbed by the Pope as he rolled into town peddling his vitriolic anti-China agenda, and
demanding the Church take on Beijing and refuse to renew a deal that gives it a say in the
appointment of bishops within that country. Pope Francis wasn't too impressed and refused to
meet him accordingly.
The snub is significant, because it reflects more broadly how Pompeo's highly aggressive and
evangelical foreign policy agenda is being received around the world. In short, it's a
shambles. Rather than respectfully and constructively engage with the interests of other
countries, on his watch, the State Department does nothing but pressure other nations. And it
does this while parroting the clichéd talking points of American exceptionalism,
hysterical anti-Communism, and a refusal to take into account the interests and practicalities
faced by its partners. The Vatican has its differences with Beijing, but how would embarking on
a collision course help it or the cause of Catholics in China? It wouldn't.
Pompeo is repeatedly described by major
US newspapers, the Washington Post among them, as "
the worst secretary of state in American history," and it's no surprise why. Diplomacy
requires the skills of understanding, prudence, compromise, calibration, and negotiation. The
current man in charge of America's relations with the rest of the world has none of those in
his armoury – only a one-sided diatribe about how every nation Washington holds a grudge
against is evil and a threat to the world, and the US' own political system is far superior (as
demonstrated by last night's presidential debate, perhaps ?). Pompeo repeatedly positions
himself as
speaking on behalf of other nations' people against their governments, while pushing a
policy that amounts to little more than bullying.
A look at Pompeo and the State Department's Twitter feed shows it to be a unilateral,
repetitive loop of the following topics: 'The Chinese Communist Party is evil and a threat to
the world', 'Iran is an evil terrorist state', American values are the best', 'We stand with
the people of X', and so on, ad nauseam. To describe it as hubris would be generous, and, of
course, it does nothing to support the equally inadequate foreign policy of the United States
in practice. This is further distorted by the unilateralist and anti-global governance politics
of Donald Trump, which place emphasis only on the projection of power to force other countries
into capitulating to American demands.
Against such a backdrop, it's no surprise that a toxic mixture of foreign policymaking has
led to other countries not being willing to take notice of Washington. It's winning neither
hearts nor minds, and it's this that has set the stage for not only the Vatican snub, but the
largely fruitless outcomes of his European adventures. Pompeo's visit to Greece produced no meaningful
agreements or outcomes of note , and he failed to get Athens to publicly commit to any
anti-China measures or even statements. A similar non-result was achieved from his visit to the
Czech Republic a month or so ago – the Czech prime minister even came out and
played down Pompeo's comments , after he engaged in a spree of anti-Beijing vitriol.
So, what's at stake for the Vatican? Undoubtedly, religion is a sensitive topic in mainland
China. The Chinese state sees unfettered religion as a threat to social stability, or as a
potential vehicle for imperialism against the country, and thus has aimed to strongly regulate
it under terms and conditions set by the state.
This has caused tensions with the Roman Catholic Church, which maintains a strict
ecclesiastical hierarchy, answering to the Vatican and not national governments. With China
being the world's most populous country, having among its vast population nine million
Catholics, this means the Church has had to negotiate and compromise with the Beijing
government to maintain its influence and control, and to secure the rights of its members to
worship. This has resulted in a 'deal' whereby the Vatican can have a say in the appointment of
its bishops in China, rather than the Church being completely subordinate to the
government.
But Pompeo doesn't care about these sensitivities – he wants one thing: Cold War. He
wants unbridled, unrestrained, and evangelical condemnation of China and, as noted above, is
utilizing his 'diplomatic visits' to push that demand. However, building a foreign policy on
preaching America First unilateralism, chauvinism, and zero compromise not surprisingly has its
limitations. As a result, Pompeo is finding himself isolated and ignored in more than a few
areas. Thus it was that, rather than completely squandering the Vatican's interests in
diplomacy with China, Pope Francis simply refused to meet him. For someone as fanatically
religious and pious as Pompeo, that's a pretty damning indictment of the incompetence within
the US State Department right now.
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The problem with American imperialism that like tiger it can't change its spots. In this
sense Trump vs Biden is false dilemma. "Bothe aare worse" as Stalin quipped on the other
occasion. Both still profess "Full Spectrum Dominance" doctrine at the expense of the standard of
living of the USA people (outside of top 10 or 20%)
The problem with Putin statement is that both candidates are marionette of more powerful
forces. Trump is a hostage of Izreal lobby, which in the USA are mostly consist of rabid
Russophobes (look art Schiff, Schumer and other members of this gang). Biden is a classic
neoliberal warmonger, much like Hillary was, who voted for Iraq war, contributed to color
revolution in Ukraine, and was instrumental in the conversion of Dems into the second war party.
So there is zero choice in the coming election unless you want to punish Trump for the betrayal
of his electorate, which probably is the oonly valid reason to vote for Biden in key states;
otherwise you san safely ignore the elections as youn; influence anythng. In a deep sense this is
a simply legitimization procedure for the role of the "Deep State", not so much real elections as
both cadidates were already vetted by neoliberal establishment
The key problem with voting for Bide is that this way you essentially legitimizing Obama
administration RussiaGate false flag operation. But as Putin said, chances for extending the
Start treaty might worse this self-betrayal.
Like much of the American public, the Russian public is no doubt weary of the prior couple
years of non-stop 'Russiagate' headlines and wild accusations out of Western press, which all
are now pretty much in complete agreement came to absolutely nothing. This is also why the
whole issue has been conspicuously dropped by the Biden campaign and as a talking point among
the Democrats, though in some corners there's been meek attempts to revive it, especially
related to claims of "expected" Kremlin interference in the impending presidential
election.
Apparently seeing in this an opportunity for some epic trolling, Russian President Vladimir
Putin in an interview with Rossiya 1 TV days ago said it was actually the Democratic Party and
the Communist Party which have most in common.
Putin was speaking in terms of historic Soviet communism in the recent interview (Wednesday)
detailed in Newsweek. "The Democratic Party is traditionally closer to the so-called liberal
values, closer to social democratic ideas," Putin began. "And it was from the social democratic
environment that the Communist Party evolved."
"After all, I was a member of the Soviet Communist Party for nearly 20 years" Putin added.
"I was a rank-and-file member, but it can be said that I believed in the party's ideas. I
still like many of these left-wing values. Equality and fraternity. What is bad about them?
In fact, they are akin to Christian values."
"Yes, they are difficult to implement, but they are very attractive, nevertheless. In
other words, this can be seen as an ideological basis for developing contacts with the
Democratic representative."
The Russian president also invoked that historically Russian communists in the Soviet era
would have been fully on board the Black Lives Matter movement and other civil rights related
causes. "So, this is something that can be seen, to a degree, as common values, if not a
unifying agent for us," the Russian president said. "People of my generation remember a time
when huge portraits of Angela Davis, a member of the U.S. Communist Party and an ardent fighter
for the rights of African Americans, were on view around the Soviet Union."
So there it is: Putin is saying his own personal ideological past could be a basis of
"shared values" with a Biden presidency, again, it what appears to be a sophisticated bit of
trolling that he knows Biden won't welcome one bit. Or let's call it a 'Russian endorsement
Putin style'. The Associated Press and others described it as Putin "hedging his bets",
however.
Another interesting part of the interview is where the Russian TV presenter asked Putin the
following question:
"The entire world is watching the final stage of the US presidential race. Much has
happened there, including things we could never imagine happening before but the one constant
in recent years is that your name is mentioned all the time," Zarubin said. "Moreover, during
the latest debates, which have provoked a public outcry, presidential candidate Biden called
candidate Trump 'Putin's puppy.'"
"Since they keep talking about you, I would like to ask a question which you probably will
not want to answer," the interviewer continued. "Nevertheless, here it is: Whose position in
this race, Trump's or Biden's, appeals to you more?"
And here's Putin's response:
"Everything that is happening in the United States is the result of the country's internal
political processes and problems," Putin said. "By the way, when anyone tries to humiliate or
insult the incumbent head of state, in this case in the context you have mentioned, this
actually enhances our prestige, because they are talking about our incredible influence and
power. In a way, it could be said that they are playing into our hands, as the saying
goes."
But on a more serious note Putin pointed out that contrary to the notion some level of
sympathy between the Trump administration and the Kremlin, much less the charge of "collusion",
it remains that US-Russia relations have reached a low-point in recent history under Trump. The
record bears this out.
Putin underscored that "the greatest number of various kinds of restrictions and sanctions
were introduced [against Russia] during the Trump presidency."
"Decisions on imposing new sanctions or expanding previous ones were made 46 times. The
incumbent's administration withdrew from the INF treaty. That was a very drastic step. After
2002, when the Bush administration withdrew from the ABM treaty, that was the second major
step. And I believe it is a big danger to international stability and security," Putin
explained.
"Now the US has announced the beginning of the procedure for withdrawing from the Open
Skies Treaty. We have good reason to be concerned about that, too. A number of our joint
projects, modest, but viable, have not been implemented – the business council project,
expert council, and so on," he concluded.
But then on Biden specifically Putin said that despite "rather sharp anti-Russian rhetoric"
from the Democratic nominee, it remains "Candidate Biden has said openly that he was ready to
extend the New START or to sign a new strategic offensive reductions treaty."
"This is already a very significant element of our potential future cooperation," Putin
added of a potential Biden presidency.
Islamist-Marxist MEK's history, including spying on Iran on behalf of Saddam Hussein when
he invaded Iran, destroying its western cities. After murdering Americans - but the Lobby
always gets what it wants, so MEK is now off the terrorist list and instead being funded by
the U.S., and housed in a training camp in Albania.
The MEK was founded in 1965 by three Islamic leftists with the goal of toppling the
U.S.-supported regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
In the 1970s it undertook a campaign of assassinating U.S. advisers and bombing U.S.
corporations in Iran. It supported the 1979 Revolution in Iran, but in 1981 it turned its
guns against the Tehran government and began a campaign of assassinations and terrorist
operations that resulted in the death of thousands of Iranians, including the executions of
its own supporters by government officials, soldiers, police officers, and ordinary
people.
It then moved its headquarters to Iraq, made a pact with the regime of Saddam Hussein,
which was fighting a ferocious war with Iran. The MEK spied on Iranian troops for Iraq,
attacked Iran at the end of Iran-Iraq war with Hussein's support, and helped Hussein put down
the uprisings by the Iraqi Kurds in the north and Shi'ites in the south after the Persian
Gulf War of 1990-91.
The MEK is despised by the vast majority of Iranians for what they consider to be
treason committed against their homeland.
So funny. I remember reading Gore Vidal's novel "Creation", which deals with the Persian
Empire, Zoroastrism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Socratic philosophy and morals.
The historical details in the book are relatively well researched, albeit one does get
some literary licence for building up characters and story lines, etc. Now the Persian
Imperial court is presented in the novel as being choke full of Greek Dissidents clamoring to
the King of Kings to attack and subdue Greece/Athens, or what not. Marathon, Salamina,
Thermopylae, Plateia follow... The Iranian "dissidents" should learn from their past...
The Athenian "wooden wall" (their ships) is Iran's missile force...
IF TRUE... a big if... this would be somewhat disturbing. One would hope that news outlets
in their never-ending search for "content" would vet the authors just a tad.
But still... the rationale for going to war (with Iran or anyone else) rises or falls on
its own merits. The arguments raised by these authors are of far more importance than whether
the authors are real or fake. Think of how often we have seen academic credentials or
military service exaggerated by AMERICAN academics and authors to goose their relevance. They
may fall to the wayside as proponents of one thing or another when exposed but their
arguments may still be true or false. Same goes for people who do NOT exaggerate their
credentials.
I would think it would be far more dangerous if Twitter and other outlets were allowing
our ADVERSARIES to create fake personalities promoting PEACE when in fact we need to take
action against them.
If nothing is going to happen to the people that committed these crimes, what exactly is
the purpose of all of these releases? A cruel reminder that our leaders are above the law and
there's nothing we can do about it?
I don't need or want to see another ******* Hillary email, I want to see indictments.
NAV , 3 hours ago
Well, if there's nothing we can do about it, I guess I'll just go back to eating, drinking
and making merry. At least Noah built an ark.
systemsplanet , 1 hour ago
Releases like these give the FBI cover for their false flags.
Who would be surprised to find people organizing to respond? No one.
A major False Flag is coming that will be orchestrated by the FBI and blamed on the
right.
BaNNeD oN THe RuN , 1 hour ago
what exactly is the purpose of all of these releases?
Running out the clock.
Durham is "writing a report", not drafting indictments. How much clearer could things
be?
gro_dfd , 3 hours ago
The legal system lost credibility when Hillary was not indicted for her clearly illegal
e-mail system, among her many crimes.
insanelysane , 3 hours ago
Yes. She had the server to circumvent FOIA which was illegal. The deep state Dems and
repubs allowed the narrative to become about which emails were classified or not classified.
That didn't really matter as any state department emails not going through the state
department system was illegal.
Hulk , 2 hours ago
As a federal whistleblower myself, this is exactly what I experienced, years ago. And this
is exactly why whistleblowers are few and far between now. WHistle blowing, in a system this
corrupt, only serves to destroy the whistleblowers life.
These people really need to hang as they may have destroyed the country...
Zionism_is_racism , 2 hours ago
The FBI agent who reviewed Weiner's laptop was told by the DOJ at the time, if he blew the
whistle he would be prosecute.
He's one of the ones who is still a live.
He came out in a book written about it.
The book neve made it to J controlled MSM.
It would blow the top off of all of this.
The data on Weiner's laptop documents the most egregeous crimes against children by the
top of the government. It's a list of pedos, money laundering, Epstein Mossad operations
etc.
MitchRyderAndTheDetroitWheels , 3 hours ago
Comey's job was to protect the elite just like Mueller. Two useless bastids.
bobroonie , 3 hours ago
The DOJ ignored 33,000 deleted subpoenaed emails and Barr ignores an on going coup...
jim942 , 2 hours ago
Trump is no angel, but his greatest accomplishment is exposing the deep state for what it
is.
Revolution_starts_now , 3 hours ago
Jim Comey "Ignored"
Is that what they are calling a lucrative book deal pay off?
St. TwinkleToes , 2 hours ago
The Klinton Krime Kartel (KKK) are worse than Mexican drug cartels. At least with the
Mexicans, they paint their cartel logo on the side of their vehicles are aren't afraid to
release photos of their heavily armed masked army and rival cartel victims.
With the Pantsuit Hag, shes got every alphabet agency, big technopolies, the Democrat
communist Media Industrial complex coving up her phat azz.
Geocen Trist , 3 hours ago
Well I guess ... Comey and Hillary are Freemasons.
play_arrow
Surftown , 1 hour ago
The club.
Remember when CIA head Deutch was lax w personal computer? Plead guilty day before Clinton
left office. Clinton pardoned him.
remember when Gen Petraeus gave info to Mossad GF and got Slapped on wrist?
remember when others of lesser rank go to jail for forgetting something?
the club.
MarketTruth , 2 hours ago
"What difference does it make?"
-- H. Clinton
"Wipe the e-mail server... with a cloth?"
-- H. Clinton
chubbar , 2 hours ago
She sold out the US, she's a traitor! We have people serving life sentences for less. WTF
is it going to take to get these people arrested and tried for their crimes? WTF is Barr and
Durham doing???
Most of you probably remember James Comey investigated the Clinton email scandal, the
Clinton Foundation and made the decision to not recommend prosecution by the DOJ.
Well, it turns out that the Clinton Foundation was audited by law firm DLA Piper. One of
the executives of the firm was in charge of the Clinton Foundation audit. His name: Peter
Comey.
( Yep, James Comey's brother. Cozy, isn't it? )
Wait, it gets even cozier.
DLA Piper executive Douglas Emhoff is taking a leave of absence from the firm. Who is
Douglas Emhoff?
He is the husband of Democrat Vice Presidential Candidate... Kamala Harris !!
Pretty cozy, right?
Max21c , 2 hours ago
WTF is Barr and Durham doing???
covering up as much as they can of the serious and real crimes of the intelligence
community and secret police community and sweeping as much of it under the rug as they
possibly can while pretending to investigate a very narrow range of crimes that they are
allowed to look at by the Gestapo higher ups and Washington elites ....
They're not allowed to open Pandoras box of all the crimes and criminal activities carried
out by the intelligence community and secret police community against American citizens and
civilians by the military, military intel, military secret police, NSA, CSS, DIA, special
contractors and other foreign cutouts, FBI & CIA et cetera....
SnottyBubbles , 3 hours ago
The whistleblower was calculated, paranoid, and smart. He knew the TS/SCI nature of his
evidence. He did not take the FBI bait to reveal TS classified evidence outside of a SCIF.
The FBI didn't pursue the classified nature or the specific evidence the whistleblower
offered to provide.
Rest assured that if he had revealed his classified evidence outside of a SCIF, he would
have been disappeared.
To add insult to this hoax investigation, the classified Secret investigation document
could not be discussed outside of a SCIF.
This is a great example of why I could not get out from under my TS/SCI career long
clearances fast enough. Nothing good ever befalls the possessor of the clearance.
Dying-Of-The-Light , 3 hours ago
This reminds me of the London trader who told the CFTC that the bank he worked for kept
rigging the silver spot price. He even told them the exact time the next hit would take place
(and it did), plus he offered to fly to the USA and testify in person. The CFTC first ignored
him completely and then arrogantly dismissed his offer to testify in person.
The CFTC spent 5 years pretending to investigate the constant and obvious bankster
manipulation of the silver paper market. It ended its absurdly long process of so called,
'Examination' by finding there was no evidence of big bank traders rigging the spot price of
paper silver.
This with the Clinton Crime outfit is of course worse because this goes to the heart of
government, but really when government is rotten to the core it is not surprising that
everything connected to it also becomes ridden by corruption. This is why banksters turned
into complete fraudsters, starting with the Fed. This is why big Corp is riddled with
corruption. This is why all so called, 'Regulatory' bodies are nothing more than window
dressing for the sheep; handing out the odd hand slap fine now and then for banking crimes
that should result in prison sentences for senior management. This results in the crime being
endlessy repeated. It is always, 'Business as usual' for those with political and monetary
power. For the rest of us it is always, 'Suck it up peasant'.
steelframe7 , 1 hour ago
Durham has already made a career out of this and documents keep showing up that he hasn't
seen. Now we have thousands of Clinton emails he hasn't seen. DNI just declassified a lot
more documents that he hasn't seen?
Who is going to read all this? how many more investigations will this generate?
Barr and Co. seem to be saying that they can't reveal anything until they can reveal
everything.
Of course its' complicated but these are supposed to be really smart people.
It seems to me that Trump should tell Barr to lay out a progress report for the public,
together with a to do list and yesterday would not be too soon.
Boxed Merlot , 2 hours ago
... the FBI, who clearly was hellbent on protecting Hillary ...
As noted before, this organization's success at infiltrating the highest echelons of
"organized" criminal miscreants was not without price. As part of their indoctrination into
this underbelly of human "achievement" came their desire, ability and decision to employ
those self-same attributes to their own internal structure as evidenced by their current
total disregard for the citizenry's well-being, trust and confidence in what was hitherto
believed to be a uniform "rule of law". Disgusting. jmo.
curtisw , 2 hours ago
" You can call us wrong, but don't call us weasels. We are not weasels."
--- Jimmy "The Weasel" Comey
MoreFreedom , 2 hours ago
This should be handled like Schiff handled his "whistleblower". The Senate should start
holding hearings on it, but McConnell is doing what? Not helping Trump and exposing the
conspirators.
typeatme , 2 hours ago
Pity about you losing your Pension there Jimmy....Comes from having NOT done your
JOB...
And being a Felon...
Boxed Merlot , 2 hours ago
... losing your Pension there Jimmy...
His pension is way down the list of importance. He was set up well ahead of time, not the
least of which was being a VP at GS. He's a groomed and staked individual, well placed for
his ability to author a book exclaiming his beneficence towards humanity while deflecting any
possible attention to his real purpose of employing whatever means necessary to deceive,
manipulate and recruit additional soldiers in his quest to obfuscate equality, success and
hope in the citizenry of the US. jmo.
enjoy
bustersdad , 3 hours ago
It's okay, he's above the law right...
BugMan , 3 hours ago
Mike Pompeo Says He Has Hillary Clinton's Deleted Emails and Will Begin Releasing Them
Before Election Day (VIDEO)
It time to make him accountable at the election box. Not that it matter much as Biden is yet another neocon and Zionist, but
stil...
American people are tied of sliding standard of living, permanent wars and jingoism. Trump might share Hillary fate in 2020,
because any illusion that he is for common fold, who voted for him in 2016 now disappeared. So he is not better then neocon Biden and Biden is new bastard. So why vote for the old bastard if we have new, who might be
slightly better in the long run
This is a very expensive foreign policy, that doesn't benefit the USA. It has potential to
raise the price of oil significantly.
Notable quotes:
"... Behind the move was pressure from the Zionist lobby. President Trump is in need of campaign funds and the lobby provides those. ..."
"... I can also see this green lighting Israeli or joint American-Israeli strikes on alleged Iranian nuclear weapons development sites and other military and petro-state assets. ..."
"... It's disgusting to watch the people of the US/UK/EU go along with this. Western elites are fat, lazy, vicious, and cruel. ..."
"... Paul wrote: "Perhaps a Biden administration would be just as much a Zionist captive as the Trump administration." Yes at least as much or more zionist. Nothing about Harris or Biden (or the DNC) says they won't be. ..."
"... I nominate president Eisenhower as slightly less zionist on one occasion: during the Anglo,French, Zionist Suez invasion of 1956 Eisenhower remarked after numerous UN resolutions condemning the bandit state's aggression ' Should a nation which attacks and occupies foreign territory in the face of United Nations disapproval be allowed to impose conditions on its withdrawal?' ..."
"... "The EU is trying to prop up the US Empire in response to its decline, instead of trying to free itself. " ..."
"... Donald Trump talked up his Iran policy in a profanity-laden tirade on Friday, telling conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh that Tehran knows the consequences of undermining the United States. ..."
"... "Iran knows that, and they've been put on notice: if you fuck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before." ..."
The U.S. has imposed
new sanctions on Iran which will make ANY trade with the country very difficult:
[T]he Trump administration has decided to impose yet further sanctions on the country ,
this time targeting the entirety of the Iranian financial sector. These new measures carry
biting secondary sanctions effects that cut off third parties' access to the U.S. financial
sector if they engage with Iran's financial sector.
Since the idea was first floated publicly , many have argued that sanctioning Iran's
financial sector would eviscerate what humanitarian trade has survived the heavy hand of
existing U.S. sanctions.
Behind the move was pressure from the Zionist lobby. President Trump is in need of
campaign funds and the lobby provides those. The move is also designed to preempt any
attempts by a potentially new administration to revive the nuclear agreement with Iran:
This idea appears to have first been introduced into public discourse in an
Aug. 25, 2020, Wall Street Journal article by Mark Dubowitz and Richard Goldberg urging
the Trump administration to "[b]uild an Iranian [s]anctions [w]all" to prevent any future
Biden administration from returning to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the
nuclear accord between Iran and the world's major powers on which President Donald Trump
reneged in May 2018.
The new sanctions will stop all trade between the 'western' countries and Iran.
The Foreign Minister of Iran responded with defiance:
Amid Covid19 pandemic, U.S. regime wants to blow up our remaining channels to pay for food
& medicine.
Iranians WILL survive this latest of cruelties.
But conspiring to starve a population is a crime against humanity. Culprits & enablers
-- who block our money -- WILL face justice.
In response Iran will continue its turn to the east. Russia, China and probably India will
keep payment channels with Iran open or will make barter deals.
The Europeans, who so far have not dared to counter U.S. sanctions on Iran, are likely to be
again shown as the feckless U.S. ass kissers they have always been. They will thereby lose out
in a market with 85 million people that has the resources to pay for their high value products.
If they stop trade of humanitarian goods with Iran they will also show that their much vaunted
'values' mean nothing.
The European Union claims that it wants to be an independent actor on the world stage. If
that is to be taken seriously this would be the moment to demonstrate it.
Posted by b on October 9, 2020 at 16:37 UTC | Permalink
Unconscionable but what is new with pompass and his ghouls; treasury dept responsible for
cranking up the sanctions program was formerly headed by a dual citizen woman who resigned
suddenly after being exposed as an Israeli citizen-not hard to understand that sentiment in
that dept has not changed.
The other aspect here is the FDD as key supporter of these severe sanctions; very virulent
anti-Iranian vipers nest of ziocons with money bags from zionist oligarch funders.
Ho-hum. As I wrote earlier, just the daily breaking of laws meaning business as usual. As
noted, Russia has really upped the diplomatic heat on EU and France/Germany in particular,
and that heat will be further merited if the response is as b predicts from their past,
deplorable, behavior.
Much talk/writing recently about our current crisis being similar in
many ways to those that led to WW1, but with the Outlaw US Empire taking Britain's role. I
expect Iran's Iraqi proxies to escalate their attacks aimed at driving out the occupiers.
IMO, we ought to contemplate the message within this Strategic Culture editorial when it comes to the hegemonic relationship between
the Outlaw US Empire and the EU/NATO and the aims of both. The EU decided not to continue
fighting against the completion of Nord Stream, but that IMO will be its last friendly act
until it severs its relations with the Outlaw US Empire. With the Wall moved to Russia's
Western borders, the Cold War will resume. That will also affect Iran.
thanks b... it is interesting what a pivotal role israel plays in all of this... and why
would there be concern that biden would be any different then trump in revoking the jcpoa? to
my way of thinking, it is just pouring more cement and sealing the fate of the usa either
way, as an empire in real decline and resorting to more of the same financial sanctions as a
possible precursor to war.. frankly i can't see a war with iran, as the usa would have to
contend with russia and china at this point... russia and china must surely know the game
plan is exactly the same for them here as well.. as for europe, canada, australia and the
other poodles - they are all hopeless on this front as i see it... lets all bow down to the
great zionist plan, lol...
Yeah but at least Trump didn't start any new wars. /s
The Eurotools in Brussels are absolutely disgusting. A weaker bunch of feckless,
milquetoast satraps is difficult to imagine. The EU perfectly embodies the 21st century
liberal ethic: spout virtue signaling nonsense about peace, freedom, human rights and the
"rules based international order" while licking the boots of Uncle Scam and the Ziofascists
and going along with their war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Russia and China need to step up their game and boldly circumvent the collective
punishment sanctions that are choking the life out of Iran, Syria and Venezuela. They still
let the rogue states of the west get away with far too much.
The Teheran men will not surrender to the yankee herds and hordes. And less so the
telavivian.
It s easy to see that in the medium run this cruelly extended crime plays in chinese, russian
and shia hands.
And they must start immediately a backlash handing hundreds of special forces and weapons
opver to the Houthi hands.
Of course there is a war on, and it has been gathering force for some time.
Iran is but one more skirmish or battle. However, Xi and Putin are using what I call the
"Papou yes". You must always say "yes" as this way you avoid direct conflict, but then you
go and do exactly what you were going to do in the first place . The person who does the
demanding - having had his/her demands "met" has nothing further to add and will go away. (I
have seen this effective technique in action).
At the moment it appears that the aim of the subversive (military/CIA/NGO) wings of the
Empire are to start as many conflicts as possible. To isolate and overextend Russia, leading
to it's collapse. (As they claim to have done before.)
The "Alternative axis" is just carrying on with it's own plan to overextend and eventually
let the US dissolve into its own morasss. The opposition are trying to follow their own plan
without giving an opening for the US/NATO to use its numerical military advantage, by not
taking the bait.
The ultimate battle is for financial control of the worlds currency, or in the case of the
US, to halt the loss of it's financial power. To avoid that The next step could be the
introduction of a Fed. owned controlled and issued "digi-dollar", When all outstanding
"dollar assets" are re-denominated into virtual misty-money which is created exclusively by
the Fed. Banks become unnecessary as the Fed becomes the only "lender" available, Congress
redundant, debts no longer matter and so on. Who cares about the reserves held by China and
overseas "investors" if their use or even existence can be dictated by the Fed?
They have already published a "trial balloon" about introducing a digi-dollar.
Iran? the US is throwing ALL its cards into what looks like it's final battle to preserve
the dollars supremacy. Why cut ALL the Iranian financial system out of their sphere of
influence? Because it (thinks) it can and by doing so cower the wavering into obeying.
Thanks 'b', very well timed. I was actually heading to the open thread with this article
until I saw your piece. This Asia Times
article focuses on three key points:
- Iran has replaced the dollar with the Yuan as its main foreign currency
"This may become the east wind for the renminbi (yuan) and provide a new oil currency option
for traders in oil-producing countries, including Iran," an editorial on qq.com said. "
- Several large banks in Iran are developing a gold encrypted digital currency called
PayMon and had issued more than 1,000 crypto-currency mining licenses, which could promote
the development of crude oil. Domestic traders use cryptocurrency to import goods and bypass
American banks.
- The Iranian-Swiss Joint Chamber of Commerce
"Switzerland had received a special exemption from US supervisory authorities to allow the
SHTA operations."
It remains to be seen how effective the Swiss Humanitarian Trade Agreement actually is.
Some say it is nothing but a US propaganda stunt. Hopefully, that is not the case.
What does Iran need that they cannot get from China and Russia? The USA has cheap corn, and
the EU has... what, cheese? Other than that I don't see why Iran needs to trade with the
empire and its more servile vassals anyway.
Strange, that ther is a jewish or Israeki ´ animosity agains Iran (or agains tthe
Medtans -- as thy are all named in all Greek records(H, that theer is a jewish animosity
against, that ther is a jewish anikisit agains Iran (or the Medtans -- as thy are old ptt in
all Greek Strenge(Hellemistic) tales, Cyrur+s the Great is reported to have liberatet the
Jews of Babilon end sent them back to Jerusalem . So, "PRIMO SON VENETANO, SECUNDO SON
CHRISTANO" -- STILL A COMMONLY ACCEPTED SAYING INVENEZIA WHEB I VISITED ABD AKED IT IN THE
THE YEAR OF 1´2917! Iran (or the Medtans -- as thy are old ptt in all Greek
Strenge(Hellemistic) tales, Cyrur+s the Great is reorted to have liberatet te´he Jews
of Babilon end sent them back to Jerusalem . So, "PRIMO SON VENETANO, SECUNDO SON CHRISTANO"
-- STILL A COMMONLY ACCEPTED SAYING INVENEZIA WHEB I VISITED ABD AKED IT IN THE THE YEAR OF
1´2917! ellenistic) tales, Cyrur+s the Great is reorted to have liberatet te´he
Jews of Babylon end sent them back to Jerusalem . So, "PRIMO SON VENETANO, SECUNDO SON
CHRISTANO" -- STILL A COMMONLY ACCEPTED SAYING INVENEZIA WHEB I VISITED ABD AKED IT IN THE
THE YEAR OF 2017
Quite impressed with all the theories about Europe and its behavior. The answer is very
simple, Europe is occupied by a foreign power, it is a colony. And all the qualifiers are
quaint.
I disagree. What did the EU did on Iran, compared to Russia and China? It stopped most trade with Iran, including the purchase of iranian oil, and it stopped all
investment projects. INSTEX is a joke. Meanwhile Germany recently banned Hezbollah.
Yes, they did vote for the JCPOA in the UN. I look at actions rather than words though,
and EU has imposed de facto sanctions on Iran.
Moreover, German FM Maas told Israel recently that efforts are underway to keep the Iran
arms embargo. (He is also a big "Russia fan" - sarc off)
In other words, we "support" the JCPOA, but in practice with arms and trade embargoes on
Iran continuing.
Yeah right.
Posted by: powerandpeople | Oct 9 2020 20:15 utc | 24
No, its not so simple, unless you claim that european russophobia started with the US and
did not exist before it. Guy Mettan has a good book on it. It is a thousand years old issue,
involving Catholicism, France, Germany, Sweden, Britain, and others.
Yes, the US wants to divide the EU and Russia. But the EU itself is rotten from
within.
Politics are more important than the economy, German Chancellor Merkel said in relation to
Russia.
"Drang nach Osten" - "Drive to the East".
Germany dreams of capturing Eastern Europe and using is as some sort of colonised labor
pool similar to what Latin America is for the US.
And this is why the EU, without any prodding, eagerly took the lead in the attempt of
colour revolution in Belarus, where it played far bigger role than the US.
Signing and adhearing to the JCPOA turned Europe and Iran from opponents into partners.
This is a great diplomatic achievement. However, no part of the JCPOA made the two allies or
obliged the European side to wage an economic war with the USA on behalf of Iran. On the
contrary, the Iranians would be the first to say they are no friends of Europa. They have
been complaining about "Western meddling" in their region for years. (Note that they don`t
differentiate but always speak collectively of "the West").
So that`s their chance to show the world how much of a sovereign nation they are and that
they can handle their problems without the "meddling" of the "despicable" Europeans. There is
no obligation - neither legal nor moral - for Europe to take the side of Iran in the US-Iran
conflict.
And actually it is both sides - both Iran and the USA - who are unhappy with the current
European neutrality.
Thanks to MoA for being one of the only honest brokers of news on Iran in the English
language. As an American citizen living abroad (in EU) I have a more jaded and at the same
time worried feeling about this.
Along with all the other stuff, including the current threat to close the U.S. embassy in
the Iraqi "Green Zone" and the accompanying military maneuvers, which would spark war in the
region, I see this hardening and expansion of sanctions as yet the next clue that the U.S.
and Donald Trump's regime are looking toward re-election and a hot war with/on Iran. Rattling
the cage ever more and backing Iran into the corner with brutal, all-encompassing sanctions
is already an act of war, usually the first prior to bombs falling. I can also see this green lighting Israeli or joint American-Israeli strikes on alleged Iranian nuclear weapons
development sites and other military and petro-state assets.
I hope I'm wrong but we've all seen this before and it never ends well. If the EU shows a
spine, or more likely Russia and/or China step in directly, perhaps the long desired
neocon/neolib/Zionist hot war against Iran can be avoided.
I think it is very important for the US to kill another 500,000 children via sanctions, in
order to demonstrate the importance of freedom and democracy and observing international law.
While reading this post I was thinking what MoA wrote in the last two paragraphs. And also
that Iran will just continue to turn to China, Russia, and others in the East.
It's disgusting to watch the people of the US/UK/EU go along with this. Western elites are
fat, lazy, vicious, and cruel.
"Europeans can not be helped. Ironically, it is their own rejection of their WW2 past that
causes them to reject the multipolar world and sovereignty as "primitive things from the
past"
plus, as you point out elsewhere, there are longer histories at play: the Crusades against
the Slavs, the Moors and the Turks (and the Arabs, in fact), the invention of "western
civilization" in the 19th century (Arians vs Semites, Europe vs Asia, ecc) ...
plus, there is the persisting aspiration for world domination, partly frustrated by WW1
and the upheavals of the XXth century, which transformed the UK and the whole of Europe (with
Japan, Australia, etc) in a junior partner of the new US Empire
(that's the other lesson learned from WW2: no single european power could dominate the
continent and the world, but they could dominate as junior partners under the new young
leader of the wolf pack, the US)
plus, there are is a class war that can be better fought, by national oligarchies, within
globalist rethoric and rules
plus, there are the US deep state instruments of domination over european national
states
but Europeans (and Usaians) do understand the language of force, and they have - at the
moment - encountered a wall in their attempts at expansion, in Iran, China, Russia,
Venezuela, ecc; an alternative multipolar alliance is taking shape
so they might attempt to win a nuclear war by 20 million deaths to 2 (or 200 to 20, who
cares), but they might also decide to tune down their ambitions and return to reality;
maybe
@m (#35)
EU promised to uphold JCPOA. They can't because of the US and they are doing next to nothing
to change that. EU isn't neutral. They are stooges. Iran is right to complain about it, the
US isn't.
Trump is a man of peace, he hasn't started any new wars - whatever that means, lol.
As far as
I know economic blocade is tantamount to war. If he wins reelection expect renewed kinetic
attacks on venezuela and Iran. He's already lined up his zionist coalition with arabic
satraps to launch his Iran quagmire. Trump is a deal maker, he understands the economy and
will bring back manufacturing jobs to Murikkka, lol. I'm sure Boeing execs in deep trouble
would love to sell plane to the Iranians but Mr. MIGA just made that impossible. Nothing to
worry about, there's always the next socialist bailout for Boeing funded by taxpayers -
suckers as Trump would call them. So much for winning, can't fix deplorable and stupid...
Btw b, Trump's opposition to the Iran deal has nothing to do with money or the zionist
lobby. Stable genius opposed JCPOA in 2015 even before announcing his run for the presidency.
It's not about the mula but all about the mollah's, lol: The Donald in his own words at a tea
party event in 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIDNonMDSo8
Ever since the Iranian revolution of 1979 multiple US regimes in DC have been totally
successful in making majority Iranian people everywhere in the world, understand that the US
is their chronic strategic enemy for decades to come. At same time, these US regimes have
equally been as successful in making American people believe Iran is their enemy.
The difference between this two side's belief is, that, Iranian people by experiencing US
regime' conducts have come to their belief, but the American people' belief was made by their
own regime' propaganda machinery. For this reason, just like the people to people relation
between the US and Russian people, Before and after the fall of USSR the relation between US
and Iran in next few generations will not come to or even develop to anything substantial or
meaningful. One can see this same trajectory in US Chinese relations, or US Cuban. Noticeably
all these countries relation with US become terminally irreparable after their revolutions,
regardless of the maturity or termination of the revolution. As much as US loves color
revolutions, US hates real revolutions. The animosity no longer is just strategic it has
become people to people, and the reason and blame goes to Americans since they never were
ready to accept the revolutions that made nations self-servient to their interests. The
bottom line truth is the US / and her poodles in europe know, ever since the revolution Iran
no longer will be subservient to US interests.
This is leverage to bargain away the oil pipeline to germany. That is what is behind it. You
scratch my back, the US is saying to the EU, in particular, Germany....
It's an
Economy based on Plunder! , so that's why sanctions here, there and everywhere!! But the
real problem is we aren't participating in the Plunder!! Sometimes you gotta use extreme
sarcasm to explain the truth of a situation, and that's what Max and Stacey do in their show
at the link. 13 minutes of honest reporting about the fraudulent world in which we live. As
for Jerome Powell, current Fed Chair, he's complicit in the ongoing criminal activity just as
much as the high ranking politicos. Bastiat laid it out 180 years ago, but we're living what
he described now. And that's all part of what I wrote @40 above. The moral breakdown occurred
long ago but took time to perfect.
I think it is crazy that EU allows US to manage SWIFT to the point they invent new entities
to sidestep SWIFT and US sanctions (which are weak and ineffective, but that is the
trajectory of their weak attempts at independence). Force SWIFT to equally service all legal
transactions according to EU law, and let US cut itself off from all international financial
transfers if it doesn't like using EU's SWIFT. US corps won't allow that to happen, it's just
that EU refuses to call US bluff. Of course they are now praying for Biden presidency, but if
they can't assert themselves it is all ultimately the same thing.
These 'foreign policy experts' think the trade war with China has been a mistake. But they
think Trump is too soft on Russia and he hasn't been tough enough on NK, Iran and Venezuela.
It has become a standard trick for outgoing US administrations to saddle the incoming
administration with set in stone policies and judicial appointments.
"Behind the move was pressure from the Zionist lobby. President Trump is in need of
campaign funds and the lobby provides those. The move is also designed to preempt any
attempts by a potentially new administration to revive the nuclear agreement with Iran."
Perhaps a Biden administration would be just as much a Zionist captive as the Trump
administration.
The danger for the world is the Trump administration may go even further than additional
sanctions. So I refer to the previous post, US policy remains the same whatever bunch are the
frontmen.
When that attempt failed they worked on convincing the Sultan of Turkey to give them
someone else's homeland. The Zionist Zealot Mr Kalvariski became the administrator of the
Palestine Jewish Colonization Association with the aim of establishing a jewish suprematist
ghetto. Following that flop the Zionists turned to the hapless British and were rewarded by
Balfour with his notorious British government double cross of the Arabs. Now it's the turn of
the US and assorted captive nations to uphold and support tyranny and Talmudic
violence.
I am SLOWLY coming to the conclusion that DaTrumpster understands DaDeepState better than any
of us armchair pundits. His patient - and yes, perhaps faulty strategy - he's still standing
after ALL DaCrap that's been thrown at him.
All the 'EXPURTS' - including MoA - can only see part of DaPicture at best.
I've been as hard on DaTrumpster as anyone on DaConservative side - but I am SLOWLY coming to
understand WTF just might be going on.
Point - don't be too sure of your immediate inclinations - we ALL see through DaGlass DARKLY!
SWIFT is only a messaging system – SWIFT does not hold any funds or securities, nor
does it manage client accounts. Behind most international money and security transfers is the
Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) system. SWIFT is a vast
messaging network used by banks and other financial institutions to quickly, accurately, and
securely send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions.
Paul wrote:
"Perhaps a Biden administration would be just as much a Zionist captive as the Trump
administration." Yes at least as much or more zionist. Nothing about Harris or Biden (or the DNC) says they won't be.
And hasn't it always been that way from one president to the the next? Was there ever one
that was less zionist than the predecessor? (Maybe they're all so close this is an impossible
question to answer, that too could be the case).
The sitting executive branch gives the favors right now and anyone incoming gives the
favors after they win and thus each election becomes a double windfall for the lobby
group?
A zionist double dip . Maybe most US voters could grasp it like that.
I can't back this up (much like my previous comment in this thread) but it's my
impression. It would probably take a lot of work to make sure it's right; one would have to
scrutinize so much over so many decades.
I nominate president Eisenhower as slightly less zionist on one occasion: during the
Anglo,French, Zionist Suez invasion of 1956 Eisenhower remarked after numerous UN resolutions
condemning the bandit state's aggression ' Should a nation which attacks and occupies foreign
territory in the face of United Nations disapproval be allowed to impose conditions on its
withdrawal?'
This could be a useful quote for todays world.
Later, in 1964, Eisenhower approved his hand picked emissary's US $150 million so called
Johnston Plan to steal the waters of the Jordan River and further marginalize the Palestine
Arabs and surrounding Arab states.
Sanctions aren't the story. Once all the players have left the JCPOA, either Israel or the US
can claim Iranians are at the point of producing a nuclear weapon. Without the JCPOA and
inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities it will be impossible to prove or deny the
allegations. Thus giving either the US or Israel justification it wants to conduct military
strikes against Iran. The only things stopping this from happening is if the EU stays in the
JCPOA...
Exactly the aim. I said so in an earlier post. This is all part of the program to create a
false justification to conduct military strikes inside Iran. At this point, I'm really
surprised that the U.S. even tries to construct these narratives after Obama's Syria and
Libya operations didn't even really bother, save for a few probably fake "chemical weapons"
attack they alleged Assad committed. Libya I don't remember hearing anything. The embassy
maybe? After the Soleimani strike and the shootdown of the U.S. drone, not to mention the
alleged Iranian attacks on ARAMCO's oil facilities, I'm really quite surprised something more
serious (not to minimize the awful acts of war which the sanctions definitely are) hasn't
already happened. It will soon, especially if Trump gets re-elected. Wonder what all of his
"no new wars" supporters will say then?
Everybody reading knows what SWIFT is. That's a nice attempt to circumscribe the overall
sanctions regime and paint it as "no big deal."
Crush Limpbro - Checked out your site. You've got a long way to go before you can
criticize MoA. Hope that comment draws a few clicks to keep you going, but I would caution
other barflies to use a proxy; could be a honey trap to collect IP addresses.
This United States imposed and Zionist inspired siege on Iran and its people will only
further strengthen the political and economic bonds with Russia and China. Meanwhile, the US
collapses from its internal social limitations and its abandonment of public healthcare
responses to the Corvid 19 pandemic. Europe it close behind the US in this respect.
What exactly is this 'Justification'.. . 'to conduct military strikes against Iran' that
you refer to hasbara boy? Failure to obey foreign imposed zionist diktats?
Would this 'justification' apply to the bandit state if it refused to abide by the NNPT
for example?
No double standards pass the test here.
Yet another proof that "Western values" and their "rules based international order" mean
exactly nothing.
In the past, the West at least kept up some pretense that it was wrong to target unarmed
civilians (still, they flattened Driesden; Hiroshima; North Korea, Vietnam, Laos). Today,
they do not care to be seen openly, cruelly, brutally, sadistically killing civvies. These
American bastards say, "... it is not killing if the victims drop dead later, like, not right
now. " Or, "... it became necessary to destroy Iran in order to save Iran."
Iran is perfectly correct to call this a crime against humanity for the West to starve a
population of food and medicine. This will boomerang just as the opium-pushing in China will
boomerang on the West.
Meanwhile, just as those drug-pushing English bastards earned themselves lordships and
knighthoods; just as presidential bastards retire to their Martha Vineyard mansions; so the
current crop of bastards in American leadership will retire to yet more mansions, leaving the
next couple generations to meet Persian wrath. The American way is to "win" until they are
tired of winning, no?
But in truth, in objective reality, only those who have lost their human-ness are capable
of crimes against humanity.
The US is cruising for a bruising in the middle east fucking with Iran like this. Not that the US hasn't deserved a good knockout punch the past 19 years since invading and
destroying Afghanistan and Iraq, etc, etc. Regardless of their rhetoric, how the European rogues and rascals (France, Germany and the
UK) can sleep at night is beyond me.
Yes Psychochistorian @ 1, At the nation state level, EU support for blockade terror and
sanction torture (BT&ST), against reluctant nation states and non compliant individuals
within those nation states, logically suggests EU nation states are not independent sovereign
countries <=EU nation states exist in name only? Maybe its just like in the USA, these
private monopoly powered Oligarcks (PMPO), own everything (privately owned copyrights,
patents, and property) made possible by rules nation states turn into law. The citizens of
those privately owned EU nation states are victims <=in condition=exploitable. Maybe PMPOs
use nation states <=as profit support weapons, to be directed against <=any and all
<=competition, whereever and however <=competition appears.
The hidden suspects <=capital market linked crowds through out the world..
Media is 92% owned by six private individuals, of the seven typical nation state layers of
authority and power: 5 are private and two are public. Additionally, few in the international
organizations have allegiance to historic cultures of the nation state governed masses. It is
as if, the named nation states are <=threatened by knee breaking thugs, but maybe its not
threat, its actual PMPO ownership.
If one accepts PMPO <=to be in control of all of USA and all of allied nation state,
one can explain <=current BT&ST events. But private Oligarch scenarios <=raise
obvious questions, why have not the PMPO challenged East eliminated <=Israel, MSM
propaganda repeatedly blames or points to Israel <=to excuse the USA leaders for their
BT&ST policies. Seems the PMPO are <=using the nation states, they own <=to
eliminate non complying competition.
What is holding the East back? Russia and China each have sufficient oil, gas and
technology to keep things functional, so why has not the competition in the East taken Israel
out, if Israel is directing the USA to apply BT&ST against its competitors? Why is the
white House so sure, its BT&ST policies will not end up destroying Israel? Maybe because
Israel has no real interest <=in the BT&ST policy <=Israel is deceptions:fall guy?
The world needs to pin the tail on the party driving USA application of BT&ST because no
visible net gain to Governed Americans seems possible from BT&ST policies?
I think Passer @ 17 has hit the nail on its head. "The EU is trying to prop up the US
Empire in response to its decline, instead of trying to free itself. "
Sanctions aren't the story. Once all the players have left the JCPOA, either Israel or the
US can claim Iranians are at the point of producing a nuclear weapon.
So you put that forward as a justification for attacking Iran militarily, but that means
according to your logic you also have justification for attacking Israel or the US
militarily. The rules are the same for all, right?
Economic warfare is certainly effective. However, time is running out for these weapons as
America's lock on the world economy grows weaker. With a rapidly approaching expiry date, the
word out may be to use em or lose em.
In a zero-sum great game, it makes sense to deploy such weapons now insofar as an
opponent's loss is always a gain for oneself.
Donald Trump talked up his Iran policy in a profanity-laden tirade on Friday, telling
conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh that Tehran knows the consequences of undermining the
United States.
"Iran knows that, and they've been put on notice: if you fuck around with us, if you do
something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done
before."
What a shit show we are seeing. What is the next phase of this civilization war that is not
a war because there are not enough dead bodies for some I guess?...but it sure looks like
war to me.
Well for the first time in history Iran's symbolic "Red Flag" is still flying above the
popular Jamkaran Mosque Holy dome. Perhaps the USA and its running dogs body count has risen
in Iraq and Afghanistan? How would we know. These things are disguised from the fearless
press in those countries ;)
Perhaps the dead and mangled are many but we do know that the US chief killer in
Afghanistan was reduced to ashes immediately following General Shahid Qassem Suleimanis
murder by the USA whilst on a diplomatic mission in Iraq.
In respect of b's observation above, the illegal occupier of Palestine is more likely
tipping millions into the Harris Presidency as well as the possible Trump Presidency. I doubt
either Harris or the biden bait and switch stooge would restore the JCPOA. Besides they would
not be invited to sit at the table any time soon IMO. They would likely refuse to any
conditions of reversing the sanctions and then carry on about all that 'unreasonable demands
by a terrorist state' stuff etc etc.
No, Iran will be getting on with its future in a multilateral world where the United
Nations has been reduced to pile of chicken dung by the USA while most other nations go along
with global lunacy.
You know what's telling about the bootlickers who hem and haw about U.S. policy with the T
Administration, but never mention Trump as the real source of it even when profuse Zionist
shit spills from his mouth on Limbaugh's show proving he's a Ziofascist pig?
What's telling is that these usual suspects jumped all over ARI @64 for zeroing in on
Trump's precise intentions with Iran but they gave a pass to the real HASBARIST in the room,
Crush Limbraw @60, exposing himself, putting his HARD-ON FOR TRUMP on full display.
@60 we ALL see through DaGlass DARKLY!
Speak for yourself- you Zionist MORON!
Ahhhhhh, you can always count on the DUPLICITY of MOA'S weathervane james and friends. Me,
I ain't here to win a popularity contest like weathervane; I'm here to kick ass when I
witness duplicity in action. My friend here is the truth that I'll defend to the grave.
********
Noooo, dum-dums Putin will not come to Iran's rescue when he's warm in bed with his
Zionist Oligarchs and Russian squatters whom he pays homage to from time to time when he
visits Ziolandia thanking them for choosing the stolen West Bank over Russia.
Iran knows that, and they've been put on notice. That's Trump blowhard
driving the drumbeat.
Just rescue me from my self-destructive self for 4 more years, oh kings of Zion and
Wall Street, and I'll give you WAR!!! all in CAPS with three exclamation points. The GREATEST
war you've ever seen.
When I read the Great Reset article on the World Economic Forum website it seems to me that
the western Globalists, in concert align the US and EU. That accounts for the basic vassal
arrangements that predominate but allow for some nonalignments on certain issues.
That is precisely what the Belarusian authorities announced when Tikhanovskaya left Minsk,
that she was helped in her way out, but we know how the MSM acts, they stick to their own
script, just like a Hollywood movie.
The Belarusians must be watching with great attention what is happening in Kirguizia,
riots and complete chaos, and thinking how lucky they were to avoid the color rev that was in
the menu for them, which the same methods, discredit the oncoming election, claim fraud after
it, use similar symbols like the clenched fist and the heart, new flag, start transliterating
family and geographical names to a mythical and spoken by a very small minority language and
then nobody knows if to spell Tikhanovskaya, Tsikhanouskaya or like the politically incorrect
but street wise Luka called her, Guaidikha. And that is Kirguizia, how about a shooting war
in Armenia and Azerbaijan, all those conflicts were unimaginable when the USSR existed, but
the empire even on his way down is insatiable.
There is over a million jews of Russian origin living in Israel, 20% of the population,
with deep roots in Russia, language, culture and relatives. Do not let partisanship for the
Dems blind you, a true successful leader is someone that defends his country's interests
while at the same time tries to have good relations with everybody else, obviously that
balance is not easy to achieve in a world full of conflicting interests, but so far Putin
seems to be balancing his act while not loosing sight of the main thing, Russia.
Putin will not come to Iran's rescue when he's warm in bed with his Zionist
Oligarchs
If Putin is so close to Zionists, then why does Russia block the Zionist regime-change in
Syria? Why has Russia denied Israel and USA entreaties to allow them to bomb Iran?
Not as strange as a mythological demigoddess that turned sailors into swain and that now
enjoys to plunge into the mud with her creatures. A bot, what an easy label, it has lost any
meaning.
special beings who was born with two extra eyes...in the back of my head.
Alaska yellow fin sole, not bad, from Bristol Bay, but the Melva -a tunafish species with
more oil in its meat- I cooked for lunch, just caught, has a lot more fish oil with its rich
contents of vitamin D, add sunny Mediterranean weather and that is my pill for today, trying
to keep the bug at bay.
Circe, why don't you do what your namesake would have done and whip yourself up some meds to
calm down? You're starting to lapse into excessive use of upper case, italics, exclamation
points, bolding, profanity, and of course, insults.
This may help. It looks like the orange man is in fact going down, so you will soon have
Joe and Kamal empowered to dismantle the evil Putin-Netanyahu-Trump axis, and put the US back
on the path to truth and justice.
The unilateral and illegal-under-JCPOA sanctions mean it's time for EU to either confront the
extraterritorial US policy it has clearly rejected in principle, or (more likely) acknowlege
that it remains in practice just a collection of 'client states'. A sad moment for me, but
useful for clarity.
Hard to understand but you guys are incapable of spelling the name of a once great US
city, San Francisco. I heard it has changed a lot, got to see long time ago, before the
digital craze.
This is a brief but subtle post by b, with quiet but telling headline. Perhaps, just
guessing, a new take on the post he was having difficulty with earlier? The question of the
EU is an interesting one - not to be considered as virulent as the former Soviet Union, but
somehow as tugged at by the components thereof...
Sanctions on Iran? We do know what Iran is capable of; surely we have not forgotten?
Indeed, by pressing these sanctions at this late date, the Trump administration surely has
not forgotten either the effect sanctions had on Russia. They were postive to that country's
independent survival, though the immediate effect was demonstrably harsh. So now, sanctions
on Iran? One doesn't have to be a world leader to suppose similar cause, similar effect.
Ah, Paco has a wonderful meal of a beneficial fish called the Melva! Bravo, Paco; all is
not lost! But you have hooked the sea-serpent as well -- take care! That one - carefully
remove the hook and set it free ;)
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Not very surprising to be honest, some people simply cannot go without regime change
to the point where they have to parade people about who weren't even born in Iran and who
have little to no support in the country as "dissidents" to try to guilt people into
supporting intervention. Of course with that comes slander against those who warn against
that, which unfortunately means TAC.
Trump ignored them??? Hardly. He hired John Bolton as his national security advisor,
and Rudy Giuliani is his personal attorney. Both of those guys are heavily tied to this
organization and advocate its line. And while he did stop short of actually invading
Iran, he was on the brink of doing so recently, talked out of it only at the last minute.
I'll give him credit for not going all the way with them, but he's given them far too
wide a berth and much too much influence in his foreign policy if you ask me.
He did not go all the way with them because he was told by the military and others,
who take their jobs and missions to server the American people seriously, that his
attacks on Iran - invasion was not "the table" at all - would face a humiliating defeat
at the same level of what happened to his efforts to extend the weapons sanctions at the
UNSC. Pompeo was sent home with his tail between his legs.
The idea that Trump would have invaded if allowed doesn't pass the smell test. He
spent much of the 2016 railing against regime change and foreign wars. His recent
instincts on this topic have been largely correct.
Trump did not want more war, and wanted to end the existing wars, that much is clear.
At the same time as he believes the Israeli line about Iran. But he did not want war with
Iran - he knows they would mine the Strait of Hormuz shut, and the U.S. economy would go
into a depression along with the world economy. No president would survive that.
But, he has had to appease top donor *Sheldon Adelson, in order to prevent a GOP
revolt in the Congress. The threat was always that they'd join the Democrats in
impeaching him, that Mike Pence would call for the same, and people would leave his
cabinet. So he caved by sanctioning Iran and destroying the lives of millions of people.
And he had to appease Israel by taking Syria's oil fields via the Marxist Kurd
mercenaries, and let them burn the wheat fields. But he did not start a war, and did not
want a war.
Lets be honest here. It isn't MEK disinformation tactics it is the tactics
of the US wrapped up and packaged as MEK. Just as Falon Gong is backed
by the CIA. MEK is a bunch of backwards ass hats with terrorist
tendencies. They are not some national level intelligence agency. This
is most likely crud made up by the US intelligence agencies sold as MEK
and pushed on the American people to convince them that Iran will be
dropping nuclear weapons on their house any minute now if they can stop
eating babies long enough, so they need to push their government to go
to WAR!!!!! with Iran and kill some Muslims. The gullibility of the
American people is why there will never be a time when they are not at
war.
Possibly, but the MEK does have an online presence and such. But of course, it is all
with Washington's money, and Washington's assistance.
For those who don't know: The MEK is a Marxist-Islamist group that initially supported
the Revolution, but turned against Ayatollah Khomeini as they didn't get to share power.
Because no one liked them. And Marxists were not allowed in revolutionary Iran - the MEK
was chased out along with the Soviet-installed communist party in northern Iran.
The MEK have been killing Iranian police, bureaucrats and local administrators.
This is their "revolution". They kill people mainly with bombs. The present Ayatollah's
left arm is withered after one of their bomb attacks.
The MEK have been killing Iranian physics professors and technicians. They kill
them with car bombs in traffic - a motorbike with two killers drive up to a car by a
traffic stop and attach a bomb with magnets. Of course, you can wonder where they got the
bombs, and money and transport. This is classic Mossad strategy. Likewise, dozens of
technicians and professors in Iraq have been murdered. Israel hopes for a
counter-reaction which the U.S. can exploit.
Rest assured, the political opposition in Iran hates the Marxist-Islamist MEK as much
as the government does. Which Washington and Israel don't acknowledge.
The MEK was housed by Saddam Hussein in an old military base. They had to leave Iraq
eventually after the overthrow of Hussein. The U.S. then shipped them to a brand new
training base in Albania. Crazy as it might seem. Albania's government is of course
as eager to be a paid Washington agent as the Kurds are.
Absurdly, this explicitly terrorist group has been taken off the terror list by
Washington. While Iran is called "terrorist" for helping Hezbollah, who formed to fight
back when Israel invaded Lebanon and massacred Shia villagers in the south with
artillery, because they lived close to the Palestinian refugee camps. And then kept
fighting when Israel occupied part of southern Lebanon, Shia land, as a "buffer zone" for
many years.
The MEK killed thousands of people, including Americans. But the Lobby always gets
what it wants.
The MEK was founded in 1965 by three Islamic leftists with the goal of toppling the
U.S.-supported regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
In the 1970s it undertook a campaign of assassinating U.S. advisers and bombing
U.S. corporations in Iran. It supported the 1979 Revolution in Iran, but in 1981 it
turned its guns against the Tehran government and began a campaign of assassinations and
terrorist operations that resulted in the death of thousands of Iranians, including the
executions of its own supporters by government officials, soldiers, police officers, and
ordinary people.
It then moved its headquarters to Iraq, made a pact with the regime of Saddam
Hussein, which was fighting a ferocious war with Iran. The MEK spied on Iranian troops
for Iraq, attacked Iran at the end of Iran-Iraq war with Hussein's support, and helped
Hussein put down the uprisings by the Iraqi Kurds in the north and Shi'ites in the south
after the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91.
The MEK is despised by the vast majority of Iranians for what they consider to be
treason committed against their homeland.
"As a matter of journalistic ethics any organization engaging in systematic dishonesty
like this has provided a very good reason to blacklist them. ...This is not a matter of
foreign policy differences: if you wish to see the U.S. pursue regime change in Iran, the
MEK does not help make that case. Any publishers or think tanks who are aware of this
dishonesty and still treat them like a legitimate opposition group should be considered
part of a campaign not wholly different from the last time we were lied into a Mideast
war."
If MEK does NOT help to make the case for regime change in Iran - & outside
sponsored regime change is not ethical - then it would be unethical not to support them,
in order to help prevent unethical regime change. Although that's probably not what
horrible Hillary had in mind when, as Sec. of State in 2012, she de-listed them from the
U.S. official list of terrorist organizations. But if anyone will lie "us" into a war
with Iran, it will be AIPAC & innumerable other dishonest zionist organizations
working on behalf of the Jewish terror state, & it's new Saudi terror state partner;
both of whom look with favor on MEK as a bit partner in their joint effort to take out
the government of Iran. MEK is pretty small potatoes compared to The Lobby, who are
waging another campaign not wholly different from the last time they pushed us into a
M.E. war to benefit lying israel.
People tell you - You are a conservative, so do I. I support XYZ thus you should also
support them.
Before the 2003 Iraqi War, Many then Bush administration officials and self-anointed
"conservative opinion leaders" went on TV to lie to people to support their war. Today,
we still suffer the consequence but they are preaching to us other wars.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
In no way should the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq War be excused, nor
should "conservative opinion leaders" be let off the hook, but the Congress was
complicit, the Senate was complicit, the military was complicit, the intelligence
community was complicit, and the majority of the electorate was complicit. Nobody
cared whether the reason for the war was valid, people just wanted to vent their
frustrations against terrorists on an unrelated Arab country that the US had already used
as a whipping boy. What could happen?
Almost twenty years later and-- surprise! surprise!-- suddenly everyone recognizes the
war for the folly it was. Some people, like Dreher, seem to have genuinely changed their
stance based on what happened subsequently. But we'll all see what happens the next time
the war mongers-- from both sides of the aisle and from all over the country-- start
rattling their sabers.
Then there are the appeasers and anti-war peace-niks that would rather surrender than
fight for liberty or that (if they are willing to fight) will on risk OTHER PEOPLE's
(other American) lives, thus removing the need to ever put themselves at risk of learning
what actually goes in in the countries they are so sympathetic to.
The complete idiocy regarding Vietnam is the anti-war rhetoric surrounding. But has
laid the framework for installing fear into anyone who doesn't tow the ridiculousness of
what is argued by protesters -- which in every way has nearly every argument
backwards.
Since the aggressors in Vietnam were the communists of four countries, it is very safe
to say that those opposed to defending an independent S. Vietnam were in fact appeasing
communist aggression and that is accurate.
The nation of Vietnam has rarely known peace and the lines during the conflict
generally mark the region that separated the country's territorial history. The South
Vietnamese sound reason to seek defend their territorial and political independence and
we had sound reason to defend the same.
It was during that era that the liberal foundations showed their true colors. And if
one doubt it --- just look at the anti-Vietnam advocates -- the managers of the Iraq and
Afghanistan missteps and p[perhaps even worse their willingness to destroy the lives of
anyone who challenged their rational based on the very case they made -- which was
unsupportable.
There are some issues which simply are not really issues,
1. the lives of black people in the country and how they were/are socialized and the
consequence
2.what the civil war was really about
3.Mexican invasion of US territory to retake territory they lost to band of squatters
(lousy immigration enforcement) a war that is now taking place via our failure to enforce
border protection.)
"Since the aggressors in Vietnam were the communists of four countries, it is very
safe to say that those opposed to defending an independent S. Vietnam were in fact
appeasing communist aggression and that is accurate."
It's safe to say that BS like this is not hard to come by in the right wing nutjobs'
circles. No Vietnamese had/has ever attempted to attack, invade, kill and spray Agent
Orange anywhere in the US. So how come they became the aggressors?!
Viet Nam became truly independent AFTER expelling the American military.
"There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee --
that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again.
You've got to understand the nature of the regime we're dealing with. This is a man who
has delayed, denied, deceived the world." George W. Bush, September 17, 2002
Bless you for writing this but you are spitting into the wind. There are too many
people who want to believe this. The IRaq war analogy is apt. You have govt in exile
types like MEK (remember Chalabi) who have a vested interest in lying to us. You have the
hyper-pro Israel crowd and the newly accepted pro-Saudi crowd w/money to burn. I actually
expect and don't begrudge foreigners for trying to get the U.S. into their fights. I
resent the MSM that is simply in love with U.S. military conflicts who accuse people who
oppose them of being anti-American, conspiracy theorists.
The most laughable example was CNN accepting the notion that Iran has a massive cyber
presence in influencing our elections because our Intel Agencies told them so. Iran is
detested by the U.S. public as we steal civilian cargo from them that would make the
lives of people in other countries better. We sell the stolen goods for our benefit and
call them terrorists for their trouble. To suggest that they have sway over us is
laughable yet this passes for journalism.
Iran will be the next Iraq. If there is a God it will be the rock that breaks us. If
not then a crime of shocking proportions.
I largely agree but I think there's room for optimism, the US military particular the
army is largely a broken instrument, morale is not good except for the contractors,
General maintenance is down in favor of expensive toys that largely do not work. For all
of the bluster of this generation of sociopaths the military in general is a shadow of
itself not to mention we live in times of a rising China and the reemergence Russia,
neither of which would allow in on opposed attack on Iran.
How so? Our government seems to be providing the Saudi's with with as many bombs as
they need, Air Force retirees to fly in the backseatair of Saudi planes, we have slowed
down on the transfer of Thermo nuclear Technology as well as I assume the the delivery
systems for them true but that was likely just a temporary Flash of Conscience it'll
probably never happen again for that individual but if there something I'm missing please
do tell.
Look at it this way. Either the Saudi/UAE themselves have to deal militarily with
Iran, or the US. The US military-industrial complex is for selling weapons to these
client states whole-heartedly for obvious reasons. The Saudi/UAE has always expected and
often demanded the US is the one to "cut the snake's head" as "king" Abdullah of the
"Saudi" Arabia demanded frequently. These states know very well neither the "version" of
the weaponry they buy from the West is capable of performing in a real war with a
powerful enemy like Iran, nor are their personnel capable of operating them effectively.
So what they say to the US is, OK we'll buy your junk, but you need to do the job. In
other words, they want to fight Iran to the last AMERICAN soldier. The Pentagon wants
none of that. But happy to run the cash register. I hope I made my point clear.
MEK have no support in Iran. If a MEK member would walk down the street there the
people would tear them to shreds. When they started killing Iranians and cooperating with
Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war they committed political suicide.
You know, this really doesn't carry much weight. I am not going to dismiss the
complaints of a group because the majority don't support them. That is not a case for
regime change. I don't see a case for that as yet. But I don't buy this nonsense about
Iran land of peace ----
They were instrumental in destabilizing any peace in Iraq and remain so. Their Islamic
revolution has not passed and their ambitions are not as benign as as many including
Iranians like to pretend.
What does that have to do with anything that I said? If you want to come to power you
need the support of the people MEK don't have that so they will never gain power. Also
MEK are responsible for the revolution in the first place, they are the ones that carried
out bombing and assassinations even of Americans in Iran. They are the ones that attacked
the US embassy in Iran and held Americans hostage. There is a reason they were on the US
terror list until 2012. As far as Iran being the land of peace not sure where you got
that from, Iran has never claimed that and infact Iran will conduct foreign policy that
benefits its goals, which is true of any nation. You should try to stay on topic when you
reply to somebody though.
Yes, as you know the Iranians attacked, invaded and looted Iraq's oil and cultural
heritage. Had in not been for the US "rescue mission" Iranian would still be there. You
must be tone deaf.
Thump the conspiracy theories and emphasize the hard-line approach with no idea or
intent to actually go through with anything should he actually win. I see reference to
Q-anon and I immediately think Trumpian conspieracy.
Conservatives are easy to target, they are prepared to believe all sorts of nonsense.
Qanon aside they are prepared to believe that tax cuts pay for themselves and you can
lose weight on a vinegar and ice cream diet.
As opposed to the people who believe that a man can become a "real woman" just by
saying so, and nod approvingly when CNN shows the chyron "Mostly peaceful protests
continue" over footage of burning buildings.
Really, that's pretty damn funny like you retards don't believe in a bunch of
conspiracy nonsense and by the way don't put down Q is good fun to the geriatric
Community on the other hand you clowns are playing footsie with actual Nazis in Ukraine
while you accuse the right of being fascist that's beautiful congratulations it's going
to be great in a couple years when this country has seceded from each other and all of
you non-producers get to sort it out for yourselves, it's going to be magic.
Fake dissident groups. Wow! Not even the Chinese are this duplicitous. And people
whine and complain about Russian and Chinese 'infiltration' and 'meddling' ??
Which fale dissident groups? I missed that. I am not being sarcastic. I see people who
have been named as fake contributors all over the place. But I didn't see a reference to
a fake dissident group.
I'm still looking for the proof one way or the other of who the "good guys" are
here.
Fake this, fake that I can get from Trump every time he opens his mouth about "fake
news".
What I don't get from Trump (or from this article) is any references, documentation,
or solid proof of any kind other than accusations and counter-accusations -- one side I'm
supposed to believe because the author said so.
I'm not buying it without objective proof and trustworthy corroboration -- not just
more sock-puppets.
They are being dissed by many smart conservatives and others, because they have become
a tool of Saudi/Israel. They practically spearheaded killing Americans during the Shah,
and now they are enjoying American political and financial support. In that vein the
adage, my enemy's enemy is my friend, does not apply here. But if you are a money hungry
Giuliani, Kennedy, Bolton or Howard Dean being a gang of killers, Saddam Husein
mercenaries, and Saudi/Israeli agents don't matter.
"We are especially on guard when it comes to unsolicited foreign policy
commentary.""
So one would hope, but foreign meddling is rife. At least the Washington Examiner
makes an effort, whereas the Washington Free Beacon functions almost openly as an Israeli
organ inside the United States.
Ehem...The Israelis have admitted they essentially founded, financed and thoroughly
and continuously infiltrated the Palestinian revolutionary group, HAMAS to counter the
PLO achieve the ongoing ethnic destruction of Palestinian land freedom and society...the
MEK and their front group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran are comparable
Israeli emanations whose ultimate goal is the land grab from the Nile to the Euphrates
known as the Greater Israel project. This is Israeli history text book material, it is
not conjecture...Read what former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev,
former Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. had to say the New York
Times in that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a
"counterweight" to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation
Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as
"a creature of Israel.") "The Israeli government gave me a budget," the retired
brigadier
general confessed, "and the military government gives to the mosques." Moreover, "Hamas,
to my great regret, is Israel's creation," said Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious
affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades to the Wall Street Journal
in 2009. Deliberately planned, as far back as the mid-1980s, according to Cohen in an
official report to his superiors playing the divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories,
by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists, HAMAS was built up to
become an "existential threat" fake tool of nuclear mighty Israel. In his report Cohen
wrote, "I suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before
this reality jumps in our face," he wrote. That was the point exactly, poor victimized
Israel "endowed with the right to defend itself". With Palestine now Kushnerized into
oblivion, Iran is next ...Go figure...
Hmmm
Means, motive, opportunity and who benefits spells out in no uncertain terms that the
entire create a justification and then go to war with Iran originates in Israel and is
being sold by the Zionists and Israel's literal army of jewish/Zionist/pro-Israel agents
masquerading as "lobbyists", "activists", "think tanks" "academics", the Media,
Hollywood, Congress, most of the White House Staff, etc., etc., here in the US. In other
words, by an Israeli controlled army in America made up of traitors, liars and
criminals.... A group who collectively ALWAYS put Israel Uber Alles.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday dropped a little October surprise said his
department has Hillary Clinton's 'deleted' emails and will release them before the
election.
"We're getting them out," Pompeo told Fox News Dana Perino.
TheGhostOfJamesOtisJr 17 minutes ago (Edited)
Shandong Carter Heavy Industry received all email, including classified material, sent to
Hillary Clinton's private server based on an Intelligence Community Investigator General (ICIG)
report. The ICIG determined all Hillary Clinton email was being forwarded to " [email protected] ",
an address possibly connected to the Chinese equipment manufacturer Shandong Carter Heavy
Industry The ICIG alerted FBI agent Peter Strzok who strangely did not seem alarmed by the
connection despite the fact all but four of the emails sent to Hillary Clinton's private email
server were forwarded to that address, roughly 600,000 in total.(
pdf , p14/105)
https://www.grassley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2019-08-14%20Staff%20memo%20to%20CEG%20RHJ%20-%20ICIG%20Interview%20Summary%20RE%20Clinton%20Server.pdf
The following is an excerpt from testimony by Frank Rucker of the ICIG, "Mr. Strzok seemed
to be 'aloof and dismissive.' [Rucker] said it was as if Mr. Strzok felt dismissive of the
relationship between the FBI and ICIG and he was not very warm." - (
pdf p15/105)
The FBI later determined the email address was set up by a Clinton IT staffer named Paul
Combetta. The FBI dismissed the possible China connection because they found no evidence to
contradict Combetta's claim he "had no connection to, and had never heard of, ' Shandong Carter
Heavy Industry Machinery CO., Ltd.'''(
pdf p104/105) That's an odd statement because IT staffers wouldn't normally be expected to
have relationships with Chinese heavy industry. IT workers usually set up email addresses for
others.
Paul Combetta is the IT staffer who used BleachBit to erase emails on Clinton's private
email server.( pdf
p38 ) . Perhaps this is why the FBI didn't consider it necessary to question Combetta in
front of a Grand Jury .( pdf , p127 ) That this didn't demonstrated
criminal intent to the FBI is beyond comprehension. Obviously this goes beyond mere bias and
borders on obstruction of justice. The numerous attempts to debunk this story are almost
comical when combined with other evidence, namely Peter Strzok's leaking to the press:
December 15, 2016 Peter Strzok: " Think our sisters have begun leaking like mad. Scorned
and worried, and political, they're kicking into overdrive. "
April 10, 2017 Peter Strzok: " I had literally just gone to find this phone to tell you I
want to talk to you about media leak strategy with DOJ before you go. "
April 22, 2017 Peter Strzok: " Article is out! Well done, Page. "
There is only one important matter at this time. And that is confirming ACB to the SC prior
to the so-called election. All this other stuff can wait. Lose and it's all pointless
anyway.
Yes, it is time for EU countries to show their true colors which will be ass kissers for
empire, most likely.
Folks are saying Nord Stream II is being finished but will it ever go into use?
And of course this is not war because Trump hasn't started any wars, right?
What a shit show we are seeing. What is the next phase of this civilization war that is
not a war because there are not enough dead bodies for some I guess?...but it sure looks like
war to me.
The next phase would appear to be Kyrgyzstan: from Belarus east to Sinkiang and Hong Kong the
subversion and the attempts at regime change are constant.
While Eurasia seeks to unite for peace and prosperity, the United States and its sleazy
satrapy is constantly trying to divide and weaken, to undermine and to intimidate. In doing
so it relies heavily on abusing the tattered lineaments of democracy- electioneering and
propagandising, the relics of a western culture which has become nothing more than a hollow
shell containing an increasingly totalitarian plutocracy.
All this simply moves Iran into closer confederation with Russia and China and strengthens
its resolve to send US middle eastern troops packing. Soon there will be a strong
Russia-China-Iran axis that is immune to all Western sanctions. Those countries who are part
of the BRI will get privileged economic treatment. The advantages will become increasingly
apparent and the economic disadvantages of staying allied with the US will become
increasingly apparent as well, particularly in light of the approaching collapse of the
dollar. As long as we manage to avoid a hot war the civilizational die is cast; the US has
chosen its destiny, in the dustbin of history, at least as a neoliberal oligarchy. When and
how it will reinvent itself is an open question, but it is not unreasonable to think it will
take decades. While Europe will eventually align with Eurasia, it will take another
generation of politicians before that happens.
If Iran isn't self-sufficient now, it will be by the time the US is finished with it. That
isn't a comfortable place to be but with key sector support from the Eastern bloc it's at
least as manageable as Cuba. The question is whether and how fast the Eastern bloc can
consolidate its resources by e.g. petrodollar replacement and better shared infrastructure.
The Eastern bloc isn't ideal, but when the West is apparently encouraging something like a
holocaust of suffering humanity, it's the only other game in town.
High time for both Russia and China and Iran/Cuba/Venezuela to really get together and start
speaking with one voice and show the despicable USA/West/NATO that they will stand together
and defend each other. Otherwise it's all over.
Specific steps to implement:
1. create and begin using an alternative to the SWIFT and invite anyone who is being
sanctioned by USA/West to join them
2. openly and officially declare that their currencies are backed by gold
3. openly and officially begin to speak against USA's actions around the world at the UN and
invite anyone who is being sanctioned by USA/West to join them
4. get together and openly declare to the world they stand as one and to invite
anyone else who is being harassed by USA/West/NATO to join them
5. immediately begin clean up of all the terrorists/CIA Operatives in in Central Asia
otherwise they will be in deep trouble
what are Putin and Xi doing?? Come on guys, wake up!
In March, Germany announced that the first transaction had been completed using Europe's
INSTEX system to skirt sanctions -- more than a year after the scheme had supposedly been put
in place.
I haven't seen anything further about it. Has it enabled any significant level of
trade?
Why would anyone need anything not Made in China? Plus China is the EU's second highest trade
partner (after US) so Iran could have access to some of that if for some reason they needed
an EU product. . . .Meanwhile Iran will be even more self-sufficient, as Russia has become
with EU sanctions. . . .The US has been trying self-imposed "sanctions" (China uncoupling) to
become more self-sufficient but it's not working.
EU continues its self-imposed slide into irrelevance. I suppose a servant's life is an easier
life: you don't have to think for yourself and just need to please master. But it can hardly
be a satisfactory experience, can it? Especially when the collar is held by such as Trump and
Pompass.
The winds of change are coming and they will be interesting. China's economy is already
greater than the US and that will expand many fold over the next few decades. The $ economy
will not survive this, especially not as the US has shown it will use its power corruptly.
The EU batter consider this; do they want to be part of the past or the future?
There is something much more significant happening with Europe, that is more than the Iran
issue.
The EU is trying to prop up the US Empire in response to its decline, instead of trying to
free itself.
The EU has chosen the side of the US against the multipolar world. It will be trying to
prop up the Empire.
It is becoming increasingly hostile to any country that isn't a puppet to the US, like
itself, and is lashing out at those countries. Like a zombie, it wants to infect others with
its infection, and turn every other country into US puppets too. It thinks that this is
normal and it wants to spread that "normality" to the rest of the world too.
Many analysts are already mentioning that the EU is becoming increasingly hostile to
Russia.
Recently, serious statements came from Russian officials:
"Russia will not follow EU and US rules".
"There will be no more business as usual between Russia and France and Germany".
"France and Germany are now leading the anti-russian block within Europe".
"Russia will no longer be dependent on the EU".
"Europeans have delusions of grandeur".
These are all statements by Lavrov and Zacharova.
Recently, we have seen Germany and France banning Huawei, Europe together with US blocking
the OPCW investigation at the UN, and Germany leading the charge at the UN stage against
China. EU also took the lead in the colour revolution in Belarus.
There are two recent statesments by the french foreign minister and by the EU commision
chief:
"Europe needs to unite against Russia and Turkey".
Surveys also show rising levels of anti-chinese hatred in Europe, and not only in the
US.
What has happened is far more serious than the europeans being "feckless U.S. ass
kissers". It is worse than that.
The EU chose the side of the US against the multipolar world. It does not want to free
itself from the US. Actually it thinks that it is normal to be a puppet, that others should
be US puppets too, and that a joint EU-US Empire should be supported, so that some kind of
world wide liberal utopia can be build by it.
Europeans are psychologically damaged by WW2 and this is affecting their geopolitical
behavior, turning them into forever puppets of the US.
They can not free themselves because when they were free once, they "did very bad things".
Therefore they should always follow their "better" and "Big Daddy" US, who "freed them from
themselves" and "put them in the right way".
Europeans can not be helped. Ironically, it is their own rejection of their WW2 past that
causes them to reject the multipolar world and sovereignty as "primitive things from the
past", and thus support a transnational globalist western empire that is here "to bring
Utopia on Earth". For them Russia, China, Iran, India, Turkey etc. are just a bunch of
primitives that are tryng to turn back the clock.
And thus it will increasingly start to lash out at any country that isn't a US puppet as
those countries prevent the coming of Utopia.
The story is now almost complete: the West knew beforehand Tikhanovskaya wasn't viable to
take over Lukashenko. The complete plan was to make her make the claim to the throne and then
be assassinated in a false flag operation, possibly by fanatical Belarusian elements aligned
with the West (liberal terrorists). That assassination attempt was foiled by the Belarusian
secret service, as I've already posted here a long time ago.
When Tikhanovskaya realized she was literally part of the plan, she begged Lukashenko to
help her get out of the country. Lukashenko helped her once again, but she was intercepted by
the Lithuanian secret service, hence she being forced to continue to pose as
government-in-exile of Belarus.
--//--
To keep on topic, here's another piece of information that may help you all understand
Europe's desperation for more Lebensraum:
vk@56 retails a plot. Unfortunately, no version which relies on Tikhanovskaya telling the
truth, not even to Lukashenko, is to be trusted. Tikhanovskaya is a Trump-level liar. The
woman claims to have won the election! The election was rigged before hand by excluding
candidates who might actually have had a chance to win, not by faking the ballots. The
simplest explanation is that Tkihanovskaya, even if she asked Lukashenko for help, reneged on
her agreement as soon as she could.
Jim Comey Ignored State Department Whistleblower on HIllary's Crimes With Classified
Material by Larry C Johnson
One year before Jim Comey was immersed in his plot to overthrow Donald Trump, the duly
elected President of the United States, a brave Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Department
of State came forward with firsthand information of Hillary Clinton's rampant abuse of
Classified material. The man, a senior State Department diplomat who had served as the acting
Ambassador (Chargé d'Affaires) in the Asia Pacific
region under President Clinton, also was a veteran of the U.S. Army during the Vietnam
War.
The letter from this whistleblower is stunning and I am going to present it in total. It is
dated 10 January 2016. You can read it for yourself here
starting at page 121 . I became aware of this letter thanks to the assiduous research and
writings of Charles Ortel (he wrote about this recently
at the American Thinker ).
The letter explains in great detail how Hillary and her cabal of sychophants used an
unclassified system to disseminate Top Secret and Secret intelligence. But the Senior Diplomat
did not stop there. He explained carefully and specifically who the FBI needed to interview and
the questions they needed to ask. You do not need to take my word for it. You can read the
letter for yourself.
And what did the sanctimonious, smug buffoon heading up the FBI do? Nothing. But this senior
Foreign Service Officer was dogged in making sure the FBI had the information. He called FBI
Headquarters and could not get any confirmation that his letter was accepted. Not satisfied, he
walked into the FBI's Washington Field Office. The results of this meeting were reported to
three FBI Agents working on the Hillary Clinton investigation. Named in the report are Peter
Strzok and Jonathan Moffa (the third name is blacked out).
Here is the report in its entirety. Please note that the State Department official delivered
the information on the 27th of January 2016, but the report was not written up until four weeks
later–22 February 2016. (You can see the original on the
FBI website here starting at page 11.)
I do not know if John Durham has seen these documents. I am posting to make sure that he
does. There is no evidence that Inspector General Horowitz examined these documents or
interviewed the Foreign Service Officer. With Secretary of State Pompeo's promise that Hillary
emails will be forthcoming, I think it is worthwhile to revisit what this brave whistleblower
tried to bring to the attention of the FBI, who clearly was hellbent on protecting Hillary
rather than pursing justice and upholding the law. Shameful.
Unfortunately the formatting on this website cuts off the sides of the letter and makes it
unreadable for me - anyone else having this problem? (MacAirBook- Safari)
Great find and wish I could read it. Thanks, LJ. Share your appreciation of the American
Thinker website.
Sad but I suspect that the shear number of those in Government that have a vested interest
in this will ensure that nothing continues to be the outcome.
Deap: I had the same formatting problem. But you can find the letter by clicking on the
link in the post which states "here starting at p. 121."
When you get to the FBI Vault, click on the PDF on the left side of the page, near the
top, entitled "Hillary Rodham Clinton part 23 of 23.pdf."
When the PDF opens, scroll down to page 121. The letter will be found at pp. 121 to 131.
Page 132 (HRC 10114) may be the postage receipt for the letter when it was originally sent,
but it is illegible.
I haven't tried to find the American Thinker article which is referenced in this post, but
it may provide context.
I found the Ortel article at American Thinker. Google "Charles Ortel American Thinker" and
you can find a page with Ortel's articles and blogs. The article is entitled "James Comey and
Robert Mueller have Massive Clinton Foundation Problems." It appears that Mr. Ortel has a
significant interest in the Clinton Foundation.
Carter Page is interviewed by Sharyl Atkinsson on C-Span 2/ Book TV this weekend.
Chilling, interesting perspective. Page's book is out: Abuse and Power.
Apparently Atkinson, of Sinclair Broadcasting, has had her own troubles with illegal
surveillance.
Often Book tv replays programs, sometimes late, when it can be recorded.
Thanks all for the tips to access this link. Got it. All I can remember is Barry Soetoro
stating ...but Hilary didn't mean any harm running her separate insecure server.
The beginning pages of this link re-capping the strings of false and highly hedged
statements about Benghazi were bone chilling to read too. I guess we should be grateful Biden
did not pick Susan Rice for VP, but then he did much worse, he picked Kamala Harris.
And oh yeah, lock her up!
PS: is there some comfort seeing my spell check still does not recognize the word
"Kamala"? The gods of small favors strikes again.
am so very happy that you have been able to get the documents to prove what became so very
obvious to so many who did not have access to documents but who just had working brains. They
help us to understand what was going on with HRC's computer situation and with Jim Comey's
FBI.
You mention Hillary's "cabal of sychophants." There was no one more eager to become a
card-carrying member of that cabal than Comey himself. I do remember an interview on
television--don't have the date nor can I remember the media outlet that broadcast it--in
which Comey gushed about how wonderful it would be for Hillary to win since his wife and
daughters and even he himself were excited about possibly having the first female POTUS.
It seemed to me at the time that it was not an appropriate statement for the head of the
FBI to make on national television--especially with all the questions about Hillary's emails
and her obliterated computer--not to mention also the tarmac meeting in AZ between Bill and
Loretta Lynch (supposedly to discuss grandchildren). I thought then and still think that the
old Peter Principal was really being played out in the FBI at the time.
I don't remember the timeline of all this. But all I remember is how rotten things seemed
were the District of Columbia.
"Joe Biden's 'war economy' policies are a radical break with the status quo."
Telegraph
"Bidenomics is a heady brew. The Democrats' $7.9 trillion blast of extra spending is a step
beyond Roosevelt's New Deal. It mimics the Keynesian expansion of the Second World War and
consciously aims to run the economy at red-hot speeds of growth.
If enacted in full, it is large enough to lift the US economy out of the zero-rate
deflationary trap of the last decade and entirely reshape the social and financial
landscape.
The stimulus will be corralled inside the closed US economy by Joe Biden's protectionist
"Buy America" policies, his industrial strategy, and his carbon border tax (i.e. disguised
tariffs against China). This limits leakage.
It is a laboratory of sorts for a post-globalisation experiment in what used to be called
"reflation in one country" – before the free flow of goods and capital emasculated
sovereign governments.
"It's quite likely that, just as in World War II, when we push down on the economic
accelerator, we will find that we have been running on one cylinder up until no w," said the
Roosevelt Institute, now advisors to the
Biden campaign .
This is why
Moody's Analytics estimates that Bidenomics accompanied by a Democrat clean sweep of
Congress would lift American GDP by an extra 4.8pc, add an extra seven million jobs, and raise
per capita income by an extra $4,800 over the next four years , compared to a clean sweep by
Donald Trump. Economic growth would rocket to 7.7pc in 2022." Telegraph -------------
Evans-Pritchard, the author of this piece baldly declares that the Trump tax cut failed to
stimulate economic growth and that a clean sweep by the Democrats in November would lead to
massive GDP growth and a reduction in present economic inequalities in American society. I will
be very interested in your comments. pl
That's a fine read Col. Thank goodness that after 47 years as a politician, including 8
years as VP - during which TARP did what? - Biden finally has a plan to Tax and Spend that
beats all the Tax and Spend plans that went before this one.
Just what is this getting spent on - the same things Obama-Biden promised, "green" (the
color of money) energy, solar charging stations and 1.5 million energy efficient homes
(didn't the Housing bubble cause a little economic problem?), 'educaiton'! I wonder if that
includes teaching us all critical race theory? and "infrastructure". And here I thought
broken records were out of style.
Where's the money coming from? According to Oxfordeconomics, which the Guardian links to,
Biden's raising taxes, but it won't lower consumer spending:
".... we estimate an overall multiplier of 0.25 for the individual provisions in Biden's tax
package. So, for every dollar of tax increase, households would reduce their spending by 25
cents. As such, while the proposal would generate a substantial revenue inflow, we
don'tbelieve it would significantly constrain consumer spending."
So what is the decline in corporate spending if you raise corporate taxes? The economists
at Oxfordeconomics conveniently left that out, nor did they eplicitly tell you that a decade
of tax revenue will still leave you with 60 years of tax burden from Joe's spending.
"On the corporate tax front, the most significant revenue raisers are:•A 7ppt
increase in the statutory corporate tax rate to 28%, which would raise $1.3tn over
10years.•An increase in taxes on foreign earnings.•A 15% minimum tax on global book
income.•The elimination of several real estate investment tax preferences." (Oooh look,
Trump's screwed! Yeah! I wonder how all those REITs look with that?)
Another unasked question: Who is going to do all that economy stimulating work if there is
a national lockdown due to Covid?
"LaRouche's comments were prompted by an article published in the Telegraph on May 19 by
British intelligence stringer Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, whose experience in orchestrating U.S.
impeachment drives for the British goes back to his attacks on President Bill Clinton.
Evans-Pritchard, on the eve of Trump's first trip abroad as President, is spreading the black
propaganda line that Trump might already be incapacitated, in much the same way as President
Richard Nixon was incapacitated by then-Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, who "instructed
U.S. military officials to ignore any order from the Oval Office to use nuclear weapons."
Evans-Pritchard asserts that the key to overthrowing Trump is to pull Republican support
away from him, which he admits is still strong. But what happens next? He quotes Sir Jeremy
Greenstock, former British UN ambassador and now chairman at Gatehouse Advisory Partners:
"America can be very powerful if it decides to act hard. Xi Jinping and Putin will probably
wait and see whether Trump self-destructs." Evans-Pritchard then raises the question: How
will Trump behave "when the special prosecutor [Robert Mueller] starts to let rip with a
volley of subpoenas."
I like the idea of a Carbon Border Tax. Or at least the one proposed by the EU, as I have
not seen Biden's proposal. It has never made sense to me that we import from countries with
low environmental standards when our own manufacturers are handicapped.
But unless Biden can carry Democratic Senatorial challengers against GOP incumbents it
ain't gonna happen. It will be stalled in the Senate. There is no way McConnell will even
allow it on the Senate floor.
This thinking has been wrong, repeatedly so, for the last 10 years. The idea that there is
just one more pedal to push down to jumpstart the economy belies the truth that we have
experienced the most accommodative and expansive monetary policy on a global level in modern
times.
Aside from the lack of efficacy, which I may look to discuss at length later on, there is
another striking thing about this plan, and that is how it will be paid for. The reason is
not the traditional "where will the money come from" I know where it will come from, cheap US
debt, but it tells us two key things. The first is that the functional ideas of Modern
Monetary Theory (MMT) that you can basically just issue debt and have your central bank both
monetize it and keep the interest payments low and use that to fund largely unlimited
government spending have for the most part been endorsed by those on the left as a mechanism
to deliver on their grand plans. The second thing that is striking though is what they want
to spend the money on, which is military spending and infrastructure and not healthcare and a
green new deal. This calls into question what alignment there is on the cadres of the left or
the possibility that starting with infrastructure is a way to run cover to expand these
fantasy economics to social projects without reorienting the economy towards their
achievement.
Evans-Pritchard's talents are wasted on economic commentary. He writes well, but in the
breathless tones of a failed thriller writer. His entire worldview is based on the notion
that it is always two minutes to midnight. It's a shame that they put all of his stuff behind
a paywall.
Maybe if Biden's plan is approved we will finally see the inflation that Wall Street and
its media minions have been whining about for the past forty years.
I have no doubt that the collapsing pocket that is Conservative Inc will luxuriate back on
the familiar loser's ground of "fiscal responsibility."
Biden's plan, such as it is, simply marries the essence of Trump's nationalist policies
with Great Society spending levels. Like so much of his platform, it is designed to keep the
progressives on the plantation until Nov 3 and not one minute beyond.
Sure it will. The devil is in the details. When has any Democrat economic plan ever
produced intended results. First they have to confess what went wrong with their trillion
dollar "War on Poverty" that now requires another trillion to pretend to clean up that
grotesquely distorted mess.
Until they confess to their sins of the past, they are doomed to repeat them. How are they
going to remedy their decades of teacher union K1-2 fail turning out entire generations of
dysfunctional illiterates who are somehow going to be absorbed into this dynamite
economy.
They are sitting in the back room smoking dope and spinning tales. What I hear is wealth
confiscation and/or turning on the printing presses. Time for a good recap of Obama's initial
"Green Jobs Revolution" from his first term - who did those promise work out and why are we
having to undo the piles of excrement Biden First Term left behind.
I have a bad case of deja vu When in fact the Trump Tweaking was paying long term
dividends, until the deep state hijacked covid to destroy any possible Trump bragging rights.
Never forget Nancy Pelosi tearing up Trump's SOTU address and declaring they were all lies --
and then carrying out her covid porn agenda to make sure she was proven correct.
Remember the three generation rule - all revolutionary and planned economies always fail
by the third generation. Soviet Union, Margaret Thatcher's warning, Cuba, etc ......if all
the wealth in the world was redistributed, it would be back in similar hands three
generations later. Societies always stratify, even since the Sumerians.
America is unique primarily because of the mobility it offers between the strata by its
relatively free market system. Don't mess with it. Democrat's heavy handed planned utopia is
a nightmare.
I am no economist. However, I am not in debt. I am not wealthy, but I have all I need and
want. I've worked very hard during my life and enjoyed my jobs because they were suited to my
training and kislls. My retirement funds keep me comfortable. My two sons are doing well in
our current economy. That's, of course, a self-centered view of the situation.
But, with that in mind, I say this: "beware of Greeks bearing gifts." (I know Biden is not
Greek, but I hope you get my point.)
I am also remembering the Obama administration. I may receive only an Obama phone and an
EBT card.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is generally a very astute writer. However, on economics and
national fiscal policies and central banking he has bought into the Davos sophistry that
defies common sense for over a decade.
An example of this sophistry is this line from the passage in your post - "..lift the US
economy out of the zero-rate deflationary trap of the last decade...". Ask an average
American if they've seen any price deflation in their rents or house prices, their kid's
tuition, their health care premiums, their cost of pharmaceuticals, the cost of tacos at
their neighborhood taqueria, the cost of getting their shirt cleaned, over the past decade
and they'll laugh at you. The cost of living of average Americans have risen and that is the
real living experience. But of course if you're Ben Bernanke or Mario Draghi or Jerome Powell
or Ms. Lagarde then we are in a "deflationary trap" and they should print more and more money
that gets shipped first to their friends on Wall St. The Party of Davos as Jack called
it.
Under the government enforced lockdown, how many trillions has the US federal government
under the Trump administration borrowed from future generations in the first and now the
second stimulus waiting for approval? How many trillions did Jerome Powell print up and send
to his friends at Blackrock and Citadel?
GDP is a useless indicator IMO. Digging trenches and filling them up will raise GDP. A
very important indicator however is productivity growth. That has been lagging for many
years. Another are median household income & wealth, which has also been lagging. What
we've seen in the US is a dramatic increase in wealth inequality between the top 0.1% vs the
bottom 80% over the past 50 years and this curve continues to accelerate - second order
derivative!! The second is the level of systemic debt across all sectors - individuals,
corporate and government at all levels that has continuously risen over 50 years increasing
systemic leverage to a point larger than during the civil war and WW II. This has occurred
under both parties and the Trump presidency has actually increased it despite the rhetoric.
Compare the Balance of Trade relative to the soundbites.
A systematic restructuring of our economy away from financialization, away from bailouts
of the oligarchy, away from unprecedented market concentration, away from untrammeled credit
expansion to back previous credit losses and having a monetary authority with a singular
focus on sound money is what's necessary. But that's not gonna happen under either Trump or
Biden as it will gore the ox of the Party of Davos whose interests is what both sides
primarily cater to. More debt-fueled government spending always ends up as socialism for the
oligarchy which is exactly what we've had for decades. It is an economic truism that as
productivity of debt continually declines, economic productivity also declines. That's the
trap we are in!
Been very happy with my gold investments these past two years and will stick with them
thanks, Biden would supercharge them.
Longer term I am looking to have most of my money in Asia, Russian oil companies also seem
to like drilling for oil, rather than desperately trying to be anything else than producing
oil like BP and the rest. Demographics are dire for most of the West and the US is likely to
continue transitioning in to a Latin American style country. People have been well
conditioned in to not talking about such things but no point talking about the increasing
economic dysfunction without talking about the underlying cause. A massive increase in
immigration will lead to a surge in inequality, anemic economic growth, fiscal deficits and a
decline in gdp per capita.
Time to start think about investments the way a well to do Latin would.
Well, Biden has to get elected first, we'll see. Carbon taxes, hmmm - another way to
destroy the middle-class?
Something to think about is the European Central Bank, they are a meeting late this month
with "experts" to determine if they will go to a digital currency. The ECB might then decide
the "experts" are right and go full digital on Jan 1st, 2021. We might see a whole lot of
Euro money coming into the USA, hope so. However, the Federal Reserve has not been printing
any new bank notes so you'll have trouble finding crisp bills for Christmas gifts.
IMO, based on the debt current and future we are loading on the backs of our children, it
matters not a whit which of the paths are chosen. Both will end in destruction of said debt
by some method - because you can only load so much on horseback and still ride. As we stand
now, we are walking alongside a swaybacked packhorse already. Closing off the country, where
the only growth has been in the services sector for decades, makes sense in what
universe?
Raise taxes? They have only ever increased in my lifetime, my fathers and his. At what
point does the Boston Tea Party repeat? From where I sit, everything either party does is
only adding fuel to a coming conflagration, as nothing is actually paid for - a ledger entry
is aggregated and we march on. The piper will get paid, as he has the children...
1.socialism and keynesian economics as a viable theory dead dead right now....today and
politicians know it
2. central banks are trapped at zero bound interest rates with no way under heretofore main
stream economic theories to stimulate their respective economies
3. politicians are largely dumb as a bag of hammers with not a shred of understanding what to
do other than to listen to think tanks warmed over rehashed ideas that have not worked in the
past and won't now.
4. what biden is proposing is MMT with communist thomas piketty theory disguised as classical
keynesian nonsense being sold to a public almost as dumb as those doing the selling
5. in order to make this works they will have to institute guranteed basic income for the
umpteen millions of people who will NEVER work again under this policy of bullshit
6. and lastly to ensure NO ONE can escape this trap which will evolve into an UGLY neo
feudalism for 99% of the populace this team of genuinely EVIL people will have to CANCEL ALL
paper money FORCING everyone to have a bank account for using digital money THE ONLY money
that can exist if this comes to pass. banks loves this as it gives them a cut of all the
action
7.as a result taxes will be anything they want and YOU have no escape or recourse
whatsoever
8. say the wrong thing, think the wrong thing and your economic life under digital money will
be cancelled placing you into destitution and death
9. this is a recipe for slavery on a gigantic scale ensuring the 1/10 of 1% can rule without
disturbance forever
10 revolution will be the only option at that point and since the police and military will
continue to be paid by the state it will be bloody
On the other hand, if this scheme promises to bring back the Jimmy Carter 14% interest
rates on CD's for us retired folks, I say bring it on. Everyone else will just have to deal
with the economic rubble later on their own.
I just need another good 15 years or so myself. In other words, never believe old people
when it comes to managing the US economy- our goals are selfish and very short term. So like,
what's in this for meeeeeee?
Biden must have listened to AOC for this fiscal policy advice. Bring back chicken coops
and victory gardens, and turn in your scrap metal because we are WAR.
What in God's name is Biden having a Brit pushing his economic plan. We all know they
embellish everything which then falls apart into pieces. Yes, Fred I remember those +14%
interest rates I paid on my mortgage and still kick myself for not taking the 100k down
payment and putting it into a 14% 30 year CD and renting. But then we all have those
memories. Sure would not want my grandchildren paying those rates on a 500k mortgage as it
would kill the real estate business and this country.
Sleepy Joe will be ready for the assisted living center by year two and we would be stuck
with Checkbook Harris, UGH. Vote for the Bullcrapper that gets things done.
Ahem; This has been done before: After Hitler was elected in 1933; He slammed the borders
shut to money transfer, then started building the autobahn. It worked, Germany came out of
the slump. Of course, Hitler then moved on to building planes & tanks. Also, Modern
Monetary theory says you can run the printing presses & print money like mad, as long as
that paper is going into a real, working economy, it gets recycled. That does not describe
the current 'developed world' economy; the FIRE economy (finance, insurance, real estate) has
eaten it's own tail. When all the other assets have jacked up half way to the moon, there
will be another gold rush (same as 1930s) & my shack in northern BC will shake with all
the helicopters flying around to work up new gold mines.
Candidate Donald Trump's 2016 programme was clear. Bring industry back home. Ditto the
troops. Ensure an adequate defence. Drain the swamp.
Looked good. I hadn't realised that his main achievement would be somewhat simpler. Stay
functioning in office in the face of the most dangerous series of attacks on an American
President that can have been seen since the early nineteenth century.
So clearly he's going to need another term in office to get on with all the things he
should have been able to get on with in the first.
Candidate Joe Biden was, I thought at first, stealing part of the Trump 2016 programme. Bring
industry back home. Turns out not - as far as I can see America will remain the most heavily
industrialised country going. But, as in my own country, much of the industry will still be
abroad. With the jobs.
As with my own country Biden's America will be environmentally virtuous. It'll hit some
good targets. It'll not use as much fossil fuel. Yesterday's heavy polluters - the coal mines
and steel mills - won't pollute any more.
Fake. Again as with my own country the dirty industries we still rely on will still be
roaring full steam ahead. Coal will still be mined. Steel will still be produced. But
elsewhere.
So Candidate Joe Biden will not be the man to put that part of the Trump 2016 programme
into action. He'll be the man who continues with the fake environmentalism we've already seen
so much of. Naturally, if the heavy industry is outsourced so is our pollution. Doesn't look
that clever a trick to me, even if it fools the eco-warriors.
In a recent op-ed on RT, I outlined the
puzzling and ironic configuration that is the anti-Trump 'resistance.' But I didn't explore one
important 'interest group' within a 'deep state' intent on destroying Trump's presidency at all
costs -- namely, the neocon
hawks of both major political parties and the
military and
intelligence establishments that defy strict party affiliation.
This contingent includes members of top military brass and intelligence
officers , of course, but also military and intelligence contractors, including those
employed by the permanent bureaucracy to foil Trump's first run for the presidency by
attempting to tie him to "Russian collusion ."
Condemn Trump all you want. It's quite fashionable and facile to do so. The penchant has
long since leaked across the Atlantic via the US and international media establishments. But
critics must be either uninformed or disingenuous to liken Trump
to Hitler . Hitler was, after all, a fascist strong man and supremacist intent on
militarism and world expansionism. And Trump is nothing of the sort.
Quite the contrary, Trump wants no part of expansionism. He has insisted that he deplores
the endless wars in the
Middle East and
Afghanistan . Trump has been removing troops from both
regions since his presidency began. And he's reportedly been foiled in efforts for a
complete withdrawal by his generals . But now he
may be prepared to flout their prerogatives and take matters into his own hands, if
given a second term.
While Trump touts a strengthened
military , the Trump Doctrine
involves a particular brand of populist American
nationalism . This includes a foreign policy stemming from 19th-century Republican
politics . Those who
have subscribed to this political position have been traditionally non-interventionist, while
demanding that a premium be laid on national self-determination, the protection of national
sovereignty via strong borders, and the promotion of national self-interest over international
or global entanglements.
Trump has suggested that the military brass wants to start wars to
enrich military contractors.
The hue and cry coming from the political establishment over Trump's foreign military
policy is a thin scrim to cover for the interests of the military industrial complex. And the
interests of the military industrial complex are for its own expansion and the profits that
derive from it.
Trump's foreign policy on the limited use of military force runs counter to those of the
Bush-Cheney and Obama-Biden administrations. Both of these followed the orders of neocon hawks.
Shocking his left-wing base, Obama retained many of
Bush's top cabinet members, including war hawk Defense Secretary Robert Gates. And, of course,
then-Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) voted in favor of
and championed
the invasion of Iraq in 2002.
The Obama administration not only continued the Bush campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, it
extended them with record-breaking bombings in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Libya. Recall that it was Obama who
murdered, via a drone bomb, sixteen-year-old US citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Abdulrahman was
the son of alleged al-Qaeda fighter (and American citizen) Anwar Awlaki, who Obama had
bombed two weeks earlier, in Yemen. In fairness it must be noted that a US raid in Yemen resulted
in the
death of Abdulrahman's 8-year-old sister in 2017. But it was Obama who exploded the
conflict in Yemen.
The Obama-Biden international adventurism extended to the invasion
of Libya and the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi, an escapade that destabilized
that country and led directly to the arming of
jihadists. Under Obama, the Pentagon and CIA directly armed and trained Syrian "rebels"
fighting Bashar Assad, many of whom then
grew into the ISIS caliphate. A 2016 iconic headline in the Los Angeles Times said it all:
"In Syria, militias armed by the Pentagon fight those armed by the CIA
." It is interesting to note that it was Trump who ended the
CIA's training of the so-called "moderate" Syrian rebels whose intent was the
toppling Assad's government.
Obama was elected in 2008 on his promise to end Bush's war in Iraq, a conflict he said he
opposed from the
outset . Instead, Obama and his war hawks expanded this war and added several others. And
all of this after Obama was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize (for no apparent reason) in 2009.
The military escalation under Obama-Biden surely explains the deep state's preference for
Biden over Trump. But what about the voters? In opposing Trump and favouring Biden, the leftist
'resistance' is
supporting the continuation of dodgy and illegal US invasions and endless wars. An
achievement to be proud of. On the other hand, voters who support non-intervention and troop
withdrawal favour the Republican, Donald Trump.
So, tell me again: who's 'left' and who's 'right' in this US presidential election?
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
How empire is destroying the American republic OCTOBER 5, 2020 Written by William
SmithShare
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Many American hawks fail to grasp one of the most axiomatic rules of history: when a
republic becomes an empire, it is no longer a republic.
For all their concern about spreading democracy abroad, many hawks show a decidedly
noticeable failure to recognize that imperial adventures weaken republican government at home.
The devolution from republic to empire has a number of causes, some practical and some
cultural, with most on display in our current politics.
On a practical level, the massive national security commitment necessary to maintain an
empire tends to overwhelm the republican safeguards against unnecessary wars. In recent
decades, for example, the national security state has gone to war in numerous countries --
Libya and Syria are only two examples -- on the basis of an Authorization for the Use of
Military Force (AUMF) that was enacted by Congress to sanction attacks on the perpetrators of
9/11.
The use of that AUMF to justify wars unrelated to 9/11 made these wars blatantly
unconstitutional. Yet it is apparent that most of Congress is now a mere appendage of the
national security state and no longer protects its constitutional prerogative to sanction war
as this would require difficult votes as well as jeopardize the largesse bestowed by defense
contractors. Madison's famous argument in Federalist #51 that, in a republic with separated
powers, one branch of government would "resist encroachments of the others" becomes obviated in
an empire. Empires tend to ignore republican rules.
The other practical difficulty of maintaining a republic when it aspires to empire is that
the technologies created to fight wars abroad end up undermining republican government at home.
In imperial Rome, the legions themselves became a threat to domestic order; in the present U.S.
the domestic attacks are more subtle.
Numerous media
reports indicate, for example, that an anti-Trump PAC, Defeat Disinfo, is employing retired
Army General Stanley McCrystal to deploy a Defense Department-developed Artificial Intelligence
(AI) tool to counter candidate Trump's social media posts and to create "counter-narratives"
using a network of "paid influencers." The AI technology was developed by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency to counter the propaganda of terrorist groups overseas. The culture of
our present officer corps seems a long way from that of General George Marshall who once
remarked
to Eisenhower, "I may make a thousand mistakes in this war, but none will be the result of
political meddling!"
McCrystal's deployment of anti-terrorism technology to manipulate domestic political opinion
during an election is surely incompatible with republican values. One would have thought that
the McCrystal revelation would have generated more controversy as it comes on the heels of the
astonishing abuse of another anti-terrorism tool, NSA surveillance, by FBI agents who submitted
phony warrants to the FISA court in order to frame Trump campaign operatives.
As observers from both parties have noticed, military technology and tactics have bled into
domestic policing with local police departments deploying armored vehicles and drones. One need
not be a Trump partisan, nor a rabid libertarian, to conclude that the technologies developed
to maintain the American empire are now being used to undermine our republican traditions.
Tufts law professor Michael Glennon has concluded that the national security state has in
fact grown so large that the "Madisonian" branches of government -- the presidency, Congress
and the courts -- are no longer in charge of national security policy. Glennon asserts that we
now have a "double government" in which policy decisions are made by "a largely concealed
managerial directorate, consisting of the several hundred leaders of the military, law
enforcement, and the intelligence departments and agencies of our government" who "operate at
an increasing remove from constitutional limits and restraints, moving the nation slowly toward
autocracy." Despite his clear desire to do so, Trump's inability to extricate us from
Afghanistan is confirmation that the Madisonian branches of government no longer determine
policy.
The rise of a double government was captured perfectly in a Tweet by Michael McFaul, an Obama
national security official, who commented that, "Trump has lost the Intelligence Community. He
has lost the State Department. He has lost the military. How can he continue to serve as our
Commander in Chief?" To those with an imperial outlook, the President serves at the pleasure of
those who run the empire, not the voters. To Michael McFaul, the unelected members of the
foreign policy establishment determine the legitimacy of elected leaders.
While legal breakdowns and the technologies of American empire are overwhelming our
republican traditions, the much deeper problem is that American leaders have eschewed a
constitutional culture and adopted an imperial culture.
Republican institutions cannot operate unless its leaders embody a certain temperament or
"constitutional personality." They must demonstrate measured and restrained habits even with
political opponents. They will seek common ground and compromise. They would, in Hamilton's
words, "withstand the temporary delusion" of popular pressures and engage in "more cool and
sedate reflection."
In foreign policy, this constitutional temperament would, in Washington's words, "observe
good faith and justice toward all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all" and "nothing
is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and
passionate attachments for others, should be excluded." In other words, republics have leaders
of a certain quality and type, leaders who demonstrate restraint not only in domestic politics
but on the world stage.
Contrast this constitutional temperament with our current crop of leaders. In domestic
politics, we have fierce, vituperative and irrational partisanship. There is no spirit of
compromise and no willingness to show good faith with political opponents. Our politics, as
Hobbes said of the state of nature, exhibit "a perpetual and restless desire of power after
power, that ceaseth only in death ." In foreign policy, the imperial personality shows itself
in "maximum pressure" campaigns, an "inveterate" antipathy toward Russia, and chest-thumping
assertions of American exceptionalism. The constitutional personality exhibits a certain
humility; the imperial personality exhibits none.
Removing the practical dangers of empire would be hard, but not impossible. Restoring
congressional authority in matters of war and peace and banning the domestic use of military
and intelligence technologies are both achievable goals for those wishing to restore republican
values. However, the imperial culture of our national security elites flows out of a will to
power that is, at root, a character flaw. Changing laws is easy compared with improving
character.
Kyrgyzstan Color Revolution in Central AsiaCrisis Intensifies the US' Hybrid War
Containment of Russia By Andrew Korybko Global Research,
October 06, 2020 Region: Asia , Russia and FSU , USA Theme: US NATO War Agenda
The sudden outbreak of Color Revolution unrest in the historically unstable Central Asian
country of Kyrgyzstan following recent parliamentary elections in this Russian CSTO mutual
defense ally intensifies the US' Hybrid War "containment" of Russia when seen in the context of
the ongoing regime change efforts in fellow ally Belarus as well as CSTO-member Armenia's
dangerous efforts to provoke a Russian military intervention in support of its illegal
occupation of universally recognized Azerbaijani territory.
Color Revolution In Central Asia
The historically unstable Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan [former Soviet Republic] is
once again in the midst of
Color Revolution unrest after this Russian CSTO mutual defense ally's latest parliamentary
elections were exploited as the pretext for members of the non-systemic opposition to
torch their seat of
government and free former President
Atambayev who was arrested last year on charges of corruption. This sudden crisis is
actually the third serious one in the former Soviet space in just as many months following the
ongoing regime change efforts in Belarus since August and Armenia's dangerous efforts since the
end of last month to provoke a Russian military intervention in support of its illegal
occupation of universally recognized Azerbaijani territory. Crucially, all three of the
aforementioned countries are Russia's CSTO allies, and their respective crises (provoked to
varying extents by the US) intensify the American Hybrid
War "containment" of Russia.
The US' Triple Hybrid War "Containment" Of Russia
The author has written extensively about the Belarusian Color
Revolution campaign and Armenia's aggression in
Nagorno-Karabakh , but those who aren't familiar with his analysis of those issues can
refer to the two articles hyperlinked earlier in this sentence for a quick overview. The
present piece aims to inform the audience about the complex dynamics of the Kyrgyz Color
Revolution crisis and the impact that it could have on the US' recent Hybrid War "containment"
offensive along the western, southern, and eastern peripheries of Russia's so-called "sphere of
influence". The
pattern at play is that the US is trying to provoke a Russian military intervention in one,
some, or all three of these Hybrid War battlefronts through the CSTO, but the Kremlin has thus
far avoided the trap of these potential quagmires. Lukashenko tried do this with his ridiculous
claims about a speculated Polish
annexation of Grodno while Pashinyan wants to provoke Azerbaijan into attacking Armenian
cities to trigger a similar intervention scenario, hence Armenia's attack on
its rival's Ganja in order to bring this about.
The Kyrgyz Powder Keg
Kyrgyzstan is an altogether different powder keg, however, since it has a recent history of
close to uncontrollable inter-ethnic and political violence after its last two Color
Revolutions of 2005 and 2010, especially the latter. The author explained all this in detail in
his April 2016
analysis of the US' history of regime change attempts in the region, which comprises one of
the chapters of his 2017 ebook on " The Law Of
Hybrid Warfare: Eastern Hemisphere ". He expanded upon his research in this direction
in August 2019 f ollowing President Jeenbekov's arrest of former President Atambayev, his
former mentor, which almost plunged the country back into a state of de-facto civil war. It was
explained that "Kyrgyzstan must 'cleanse' its 'deep state' (permanent bureaucracy)
simultaneously with cracking down on organized crime (which is sometimes affiliated with some
'deep state' forces)." This is the only way to combat the destabilizing clan-based nature of
the country (worsened by Western NGOs and diplomatic meddling )
that's responsible for its regular unrest.
Will The Crisis From 2010 Repeat Itself?
The present situation is so dangerous though because the last round of Color Revolution
unrest in 2010 sparked accusations of ethnic cleansing against the local Uzbeks that inhabit
Kyrgyzstan's portion of the divided Fergana Valley. That in turn almost provoked an
international conflict between both landlocked states that was thankfully averted at the last
minute by Tashkent's reluctance to worsen the security situation by launching a "humanitarian
intervention" in Russia's CSTO ally (one which could have also been exploited to promote the
concept of "Greater Uzbekistan" over the neighboring lands inhabited by its ethnic kin
considering the country's closer coordination with American strategic goals at the time).
Uzbekistan has since moved closer to Russia after the passing of former President Karimov, but
its basic security interests remain the same, particularly as far as ensuring the safety of its
ethnic kin in neighboring states. Any repeat of the 2010 scenario could therefore return
Central Asia to the brink of war unless a Russian diplomatic intervention averts it.
The Threat To Russian Interests
From the Russian perspective, Kyrgyzstan's capture by Western-backed political forces could
lead to long-term security implications. The state's potential internal collapse could turn it
into a regional exporter of terrorism, especially throughout the volatile Fergana Valley but
also across China's neighboring region of Xinjiang if a new government decides to host Uighur
terrorists. The soft security consequences are that Kyrgyzstan's Color Revolution government
could reduce its commitment to the CSTO and Eurasian Union up to and including the country's
potential withdrawal from these organizations if the new power structure isn't co-opted by
Russian-friendly forces first. It's possible, however, that Moscow might succeed in mitigating
the blow to its geopolitical interests in the scenario of a regime change in Bishkek since it
had previously worked real closely with Atambayev (who's the most likely candidate to seize
power, either directly or by proxy), though only if it can prevent a civil war from breaking
out first. That might necessitate a CSTO intervention, however, which is risky.
Concluding Thoughts
As it stands, the US' Hybrid War "containment" of Russia is making progress along the
western, southern, and eastern periphery of the Eurasian Great Power's "sphere of influence".
Belarus is no longer as stable as it has historically been known for being, Armenia is still
trying to trick Russia into going to war against Azerbaijan (and by extension Turkey), and
Kyrgyzstan is once again on the verge of a collapse that could take down the rest of Central
Asia in the worst-case scenario. Having shrewdly avoided the first two traps, at least for the
time being, Russia is now being challenged with the most serious crisis of the three after the
latest events in Kyrgyzstan. The country's clan-based nature, proliferation of Western NGOs,
and Western meddling in its admittedly imperfect democracy make it extremely unstable, thus
heightening the risks that any well-intended Russian military stabilization intervention via
the CSTO could entail, perhaps explaining why one never happened in 2010 during more dangerous
times. The Kremlin will therefore have to carefully weigh its options in Kyrgyzstan.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your
email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
This article was originally published on OneWorld .
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the
relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China's One Belt One Road global vision
of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global
Research.
Former FBI Director James Comey testified to Congress last Wednesday that he did not
remember much about what was going on when the FBI deceived the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) Court into approving four warrants for surveillance of Trump campaign
aide Carter Page.
Few outsiders are aware that those warrants covered not only Page but also anyone Page was
in contact with as well as anyone Page's contacts were in contact with – under the
so-called two-hop surveillance procedure. In other words, the warrants extend coverage two
hops from the target – that is, anyone Page talks to and anyone they, in turn, talk
to.
At the hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsay Graham reviewed the facts (most
of them confirmed by the Department of Justice inspector general) showing that none of the
four FISA warrants were warranted.
Graham gave a chronological rundown of the evidence that Comey and his "folks" either
knew, or should have known, that by signing fraudulent FISA warrant applications they were
perpetrating a fraud on the court.
The "evidence" used by Comey and his "folks" to "justify" warrants included Page's
contacts with Russian officials (CIA had already told the FBI those contacts had been
approved) and the phony as a three-dollar bill "Steele dossier" paid for by the
Democrats.
Two Hops to the World
But let's not hop over the implications of two-hop surveillance , which apparently remains
in effect today. Few understand the significance of what is known in the trade as "two-hop"
coverage. According to a former NSA technical director, Bill Binney, when President Barack
Obama approved the current version of "two hops," the NSA was ecstatic – and it is easy
to see why.
Let's say Page was in touch with Donald Trump (as candidate or president); Trump's
communications could then be surveilled, as well. Or, let's say Page was in touch with
Google. That would enable NSA to cover pretty much the entire world. A thorough read of the
transcript of Wednesday's hearing, particularly the Q-and-A, shows that this crucial two-hop
dimension never came up – or that those aware of it, were too afraid to mention it. It
was as if Page were the only one being surveilled.
Here is a sample of The New York Times 's typical coverage
of such a hearing:
"Senate Republicans sought on Wednesday to promote their efforts to rewrite the
narrative of the Trump-Russia investigation before Election Day, using a hearing with the
former F.B.I. director James B. Comey to cast doubt on the entire inquiry by highlighting
problems with a narrower aspect of it.
"Led by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary
Committee spent hours burrowing into mistakes and omissions made by the FBI when it applied
for court permission to wiretap the former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in 2016 and
2017. Republicans drew on that flawed process to renew their claims that Mr. Comey and his
agents had acted with political bias, ignoring an independent review that debunked
the notion of a plot against President Trump."
Flawed process? Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz pinpointed no few
than 17 "serious performance failures" related to the four FISA warrant applications on Page.
Left unsaid is the fact that Horowitz's investigation was tightly circumscribed. Basically,
he asked the major players "Were you biased?" And they said "No."
Chutzpah-full Disingenuousness
Does the NYT believe we were all born yesterday? When the Horowitz report was
released in early December 2019, Fox News' Chris Wallace found those serious performance
failures "pretty shocking." He quoted an
earlier remark by Rep. Will Hurd (R,TX) a CIA alumnus:
"Why is it when you have 17 mistakes -- 17 things that are misrepresented or lapses --
and every one of them goes against the president and for investigating him, you have to say,
'Is that a coincidence'? it is either gross incompetence or intentionality."
Throughout the four-hour hearing on Wednesday, Comey was politely smug – a hair
short of condescending.
There was not the slightest sign he thought he would ever be held accountable for what
happened under his watch. You see, four years ago, Comey "knew" Hillary Clinton was a
shoo-in; that explains how he, together with CIA Director John Brennan and National
Intelligence Director James Clapper, felt free to take vast liberties with the Constitution
and the law before the election, and then launched a determined effort to hide their tracks
post election.
Trump had been forewarned. On Jan. 3, 2017, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY),
with an assist from Rachel Maddow, warned Trump not to get crosswise with the "intelligence
community," noting the IC has six ways to Sunday to get back at you.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/fotKK5kcMOg
Three days later, Comey told President-elect Trump, in a one-on-one conversation, what the
FBI had on him – namely, the "Steele Dossier." The media already had the dossier, but
were reluctant (for a host of obvious reasons) to publish it. When it leaked that Comey had
briefed Trump on it, they finally had the needed peg.
New Parvenu in Washington
After the tête-à-tête with Comey on Jan. 6, 2017, newcomer Trump didn't
know what hit him. Perhaps no one told him of Schumer's warning; or maybe he dismissed it out
of hand. Is that what Comey was up to on Jan. 6, 2017?
Was the former FBI director protesting too much in his June 2017 testimony to the Senate
Intelligence Committee when he insisted he'd tried to make it clear to Trump that briefing
him on the unverified but scurrilous information in the dossier wasn't intended to be
threatening?
It took Trump several months to figure out what
was being done to him.
Trump to NYT: 'Leverage' (aka Blackmail)
In a long Oval Office interview
with the Times on July 19, 2017, Trump said he thought Comey was trying to hold the
dossier over his head.
" Look what they did to me with Russia, and it was totally phony stuff. the dossier Now,
that was totally made-up stuff," Trump said. "I went there [to Moscow] for one day for the
Miss Universe contest, I turned around, I went back. It was so disgraceful. It was so
disgraceful.
"When he [Comey] brought it [the dossier] to me, I said this is really made-up junk. I
didn't think about anything. I just thought about, man, this is such a phony deal. I said,
this is – honestly, it was so wrong, and they didn't know I was just there for a very
short period of time. It was so wrong, and I was with groups of people. It was so wrong that
I really didn't, I didn't think about motive. I didn't know what to think other than, this is
really phony stuff."
The Steele dossier, paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign
and compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, includes a tale of Trump cavorting
with prostitutes, who supposedly urinated on each other before the same bed the Obamas had
slept in at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton hotel.
Trump told the Times : "I think [Comey] shared it so that I would think he had it
out there. As leverage."
Still Anemic
Even with that lesson in hand, Trump still proved virtually powerless in dealing with the
National Security State/intelligence community. The president has evidenced neither the skill
nor the guts to even attempt to keep the National Security State in check.
Comey, no doubt doesn't want to be seen as a "dirty cop," With Trump in power and Attorney
General William Barr his enforcer, there was always the latent threat that they would use the
tools at their disposal to expose and even prosecute Comey and his National Security State
colleagues for what the president now knows was done during his candidacy and presidency.
Despite their braggadocio about taking on the Deep State, and the continuing
investigations, it seems doubtful that anything serious is likely to happen before Election
Day, Nov. 3.
On Wednesday, Comey had the air of one who is equally sure, this time around, who will be
the next president. No worries. Comey could afford to be politely vapid for five more weeks,
and then be off the hook for any and all "serious performance failures" – some of them
felonies.
Thus, a significant downside to a Biden victory is that the National Security State will
escape accountability for unconscionable misbehavior, running from misdemeanors to
insurrection. No small thing.
Sen. Graham concluded the hearing with a pious plea: "Somebody needs to be held
accountable." Yet, surely, he has been around long enough to know the odds.
Given his disastrous presidency, either way the prospects are bleak: no accountability for
the National Security State, which is to be expected, or four more years of Trump.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as
Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President's Daily
Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). This
originally appeared at Consortium
News .
One morning a couple of years ago I received an urgent email from a moderately prominent
libertarian figure strongly focused on antiwar issues. He warned me that our publication had
been branded a "White Supremacist website" by the Washington Post , and urged me to
immediately respond, perhaps by demanding a formal retraction or even taking legal action lest
we be destroyed by that totally unfair accusation.
When I looked into the matter, my own perspective was rather different. Apparently Max Boot,
one of the more agitated Jewish Neocons, had written
a column fiercely denouncing some recent criticism of pro-Israel policies that Philip
Giraldi had published in our webzine, and the "White Supremacist" slur was merely his crude
means of demonizing the author's views for those of his readers who might be less than
wholeheartedly enthusiastic about Benjamin Netanyahu and his policies.
After pointing this out to my correspondent, I also noted that a good 10% or more of our
writers were probably "White Nationalists," and perhaps a few of them might even arguably be
labeled "White Supremacists." So although Boot's description of our website was certainly
wrong, it was probably less wrong than the vast majority of his other writing, which was
typically focused on American military policy and the Middle East.
Our webzine is quite unusual in its willingness to feature a smattering of writers who
provide a White Nationalist perspective. Such individuals are almost totally excluded from
other online publications, except for those marginalized websites devoted to their ideas, which
often tend to focus on such topics and related issues to the near exclusion of anything else.
However, I believe that maintaining this sort of ideological quarantine or "ghettoization"
greatly diminishes the ability to understand many important aspects of our world.
And I suspect that Azerbaijan will do no harm to the Armenian civilians that stay.
They'll be model liberators. And they'll take time to bring back Azerbaijani civilians
(refugees/IDPs) to their homes, especially in areas that would become mixed as a result of
return."
Agreed, this is rubbish. "Mr. C" – assuming someone like this even exists, is either
terribly misinformed or an outright liar. Basically, if we follow Escobar's logic, Armenian's
are making a mistake by not agreeing to surrender their lives to the peace loving and rather
humanistic dictatorship of Azerbaijan. While he touches on some relevant points, overall,
Escobar has not done his homework and has come up with quite a bit of drivel.
Pepe, you didn't mention the Armenian Genocide, the Greek Genocide, the Assyrian Genocide,
all perpetrated by Turkey.
Why not? Would the Azeris, all Turks, be different? You say the Azeris if they won, Turks,
would treat the Armenian population nicely. Huh?
I remember from Runciman's book on the First Crusade that the Turks had already taken over
much of Anatolia but he seems to mention Armenians at every turn (from memory -- don't have
the book handy).
My impression is that before the Genocide the Armenians were all over Anatolia. There was
a narrow coastal strip at the western end that was historically part of Greece, and many
different peoples of Asia Minor are mentioned in the NT, but they arguably were all
Armenians, making the Armenians the indigenous people of Anatolia.
How is it that Turkey was allowed to keep part of Europe after WWI when they were losers?
And did they keep faith? Is the current St Sophia turmoil the norm of Turkish good faith?
Time for all the Turks to get out of Anatolia, give it back to Armenia, and head for
Azerbigan.
@Yevardian having been disciplined for some years now is, once again, at the throat of
the west. Europe spent millions of lives and huge resources throwing the Moors out last time.
If they don't take a stand and support Armenia they may very well have to do it again. As far
as the mythical Mr C is concerned he comes across, to me, as yet another apologist for the
Religion of Peace. Obviously cucked NATO will not help Armenia, they have neither the
intestinal fortitude nor the will, so it will be left to Russia and the Visigrad nations, in
the mean time Turkey is attempting to take Greek territory, Syrian territory, Libyan
territory and anything else that it can get it's mitts on and the West does absolutely
nothing. This will not end well.
I think few Armenian civilians will take the chance but I very much doubt Azerbaijanis
will be "model liberators". The new Azerbaijani state was born from the Sumgait and Baku
pogroms. I also don't think they will delay in moving Azeris into areas formerly inhabited by
Armenians – their role model Erdoğan has been trying to change facts on the ground
by moving ethnic Turks into Kurdish areas in his own country.
@Ann Nonny Mouse endeavor, even if they were the majority, though most accounts say they
were 40%.
I would strongly urge the Armenians to get off their nationalist high horse and solve the
problem diplomatically and learn to live with their neighbors. Super nationalism is a
dangerous and fake mantra that usually leads to disaster. My understanding was that the
Azeris and Armenians always got along before this debacle. They should try to work out things
and get back to a their original multi-cultural paradigm, that is living side by side instead
of fighting and dying over territory and national flags. Live is short and when we pass to
the other side you dont carry your flag with you.
The Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence in 1991: but that was not
recognized by the "international community"
Just to throw in quickly that if Kosovo is "recognized", then bleeding Karabakh should
also long since have been recognized. Especially since the Armenians have an actual holocaust
in their 20th century past.
So, seems like the way to get sympathy to rob territory is to make full use of any
"genocide" one had suffered as excuse . worked very well ( in fact, spectacularly well) so
faR with the Chosen ones .
Well i admittedly dont know enough about the situation to try to critique this piece as
some of the other comments on here But i am skeptical about Armenia and their stated intent.
If it is reallly about protecting an ethnic group – then why not offer them citizenship
to move into your territory??? That would lead me to believe it is more about land and
resources
Yeah i dont know the nitty gritty in this conflict – but i do agree Edrogan seems to
be biting off more than he can chew He has too many pots on the fire it seems. Kurds –
Qatar/Saudis – Libya – Syria – Greece – Cyprus – and now
this..?
Aside from refusing to participate against their Muslim cousins (Afghanistan, Libya),
Turkey is using NATO doctrine quite effectively. It is a useful bullet prove vest for
Erdogan. The Brussels morons will be sorry for not expelling Turkey from their military club
long time ago.
@Ann Nonny Mouse driven to the Syrian desert AFTER some of them had aligned with the
Russians who were about to invade eastern Anatolia in 1915. Similarly, most of Crimean Tatars
were expelled from Crimea AFTER some of them had aligned with the invading Germans in 1941.
As another comparison, American-Japanese living at the Pacific coast were banished to camps
in the interior AFTER the Japanese army had attacked Pearl Harbor and not before.
When a group of people kill or drive out another group it's usually not for the fun of it but
rather due to necessities of survival, whatever evil that might require at that particular
time depending on the particular circumstances.
It would be interesting to read a scholarly exposition on what the USSR and governments in
Eastern Europe proper did or did not do to educate people away from their ancient hatreds,
and why whatever they did do appears not to have been particularly successful. Or was it
mostly successful and the hatreds were much more intense before 1917?
The entire Jewish American lobby and Israel are on Azerbaijan's side and anti-Armenian,
just as when they were working with Turkey to deny the Armenian genocide.
Israel has also sold billions of dollars of weapons to Azerbaijan which the latter is
using against Armenians. Israel gets oil from Azerbaijan
Of course, Azerbaijan and Turkey have imported jihadists from Syria and Libya to fight
Christian Armenians now.
Apparently, Pepe, you and the Jewish lobby, Israel, Turkey, and the jihadists are on the
same side.
Congratulations.
P.S. It would take a hundred pages to list all the factual errors you made. For example,
Armenians were still the clear majority in Artsakh/Karabagh in 1988 and 1991. Armenians there
had been grossly mistreated by Azerbaijan for decades.
The fighting occurred in the late 1980s only because Azerbaijan, backed by the Russian
military, killed and harrassed Armenians. The Azeris also committed massacres of Armenians
who were living in Baku and Sumgait in the late 1980s.
Stalin also placed Nakhichevan, an Armenian territory, inside Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan kicked out every Armenian from Nakhichevan. Azerbaijan was doing that to
Artsakh/Karabagh too.
No wonder Artsakh voted to be independent from Azerbaijan, something you don't want to
understand.
Better luck next time trying to fool readers, Pepe.
The key fact remains that as long as Armenia proper is not attacked by Azerbaijan,
Russia will not apply the CSTO treaty and step in. Erdogan knows this is his red line.
Moscow has all it takes to put him in serious trouble – as in shutting off gas
supplies to Turkey.
Russia isn't going to shut off gas to Turkey. Russia never does that (shutting off gas).
It's a Western canard.
Russia could, however, impose a no-fly-zone over Georgia, effectively blocking resupply
and reinforcements to Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is almost completely surrounded by Russian
allies and bases. They rely on Georgia for military transit.
Ignorant post. Armenian nationalist were active in Russia prior to ww1, then supported
Russian entrance into Turkish territory because they shared a religion. They stabbed the
ottomans , of which they were a big part, in the back. The young Turks , who were actually
donmeh jews, had them marched off to Syria and lebanon, etc, causing many deaths! The
Armenian is still causing trouble for the Turks. They sided with the mongols in their battles
against the Muslims, along wit the Georgians, repeatedly. More to a small story
What's going to happen to USA? The poverty and racial intolerance ,both seem to be
undermining the stability and the ideological integrity of the country . I see many states
emerging from the body of America.But the problems will not be resolved . It might just like
like Caucasian territory or Balkan .
1. BTC is described as 'bypassing Iran'. One could easily argue it also bypasses *Russia*
. Perhaps that's what made it necessary for Soros & others to peel Georgia off from
Russian control back in the day? Look how Russia responded by recapturing the Georgian
Military Highway (South Ossetia).
2. Look in general at how Russia is willing to give up huge areas of territory so long as
she keeps key strategic points of control: South Ossetia, Crimea, Transnistria, Abkhazia and
Armenia. Smell the coffee.
3. 2. 'Mr. C' is quick to mention Baku/Ankara joint exercises in August, but fails to
mention Kavkas 2020 exercises led by Russia. Uh duh.
4. 'Mr. C' seems to ignore the fact that Armenia couldn't have taken that territory in
first place, or kept it, w/out Russian assistance. And idea 'Russia can do nothing' is
absurd. As is the idea that Russia can't supply Armenia because there's no land connection.
Did the allies have any problem keeping West Berlin supplied by air? Of course not. All
nonsense.
5. The idea that there is a 'Russia/Turkey' strategic partnership is also silly. Where is
this partnership? Turkey buying S-400s? So what? Are they in partnership in Syria? In Libya?
No. So why would they be in N-K?
6. Weird. No mention of China and it's growing relationship with Turkey. This probably
tells you all you need to know about the author. Unless of course the author is just a fool,
which is also possible.
"Yet even before the collapse the Azerbaijani Army and Armenian independentists were
already at war (1988-1994), which yielded a grim balance of 30,000 dead and roughly a million
wounded."
This is a wounded-to-killed ratio of thirty-three to one. Doesn't make sense.
Were Russia to be as devious and underhanded as the puppet regime in the Di$trict of
Corruption, they would arrange for an overthrow of the present NATO/EU/U$ regime in Yerevan.
With those bastards out of the way and Armenia no longer playing double jeopardy, it might be
possible for a new Orthodox oriented Armenian government to come to some sort of arrangement
with Baku.
At the same time, perhaps Syrian spetsnaz units could practice some infiltration tactics
into Turkish semi-occupied "greater" Idlib and Ghurka style, behead a few Turkish officers
running the show there.
"Sultan" Erdogan is playing loose and wild with his shattering economy and massive
military. It is high time he was given a black-eye–one that would cause him to lose
face among his own countrymen.
This is my educated guess, the Anglo-Zionists led by Rothschild and Netanayahu destablize
the oil in the Middle East to keep their prices of oil in USD above 100 $/barrel
They have also blown up oil derricks in the North Sea, shut down Iranian and Iraq and
Syria oil production. The game is clear, low oil prices are being met with wiping out the
competition.
And causing hell in Iran and Venezueala. Back in 1954 Operation Ajax took out Mossadeq and
installed the Shah – puppet of big oil. Before it was BP it was the Persian Gulf Oil
Co. BP is owned mostly by the crown.
Trump's secretary of state was Rex Tillerson CEO Exxon just like GW Bush picked Condoleeza
Rice CEO Chevron to be his national security advisor.
The Israel angle is to get Iran and to goad Russia into war with the USA, the eventually
goal is that USA-Russia-China are reduced while Jews rule the world from Jerusalem.
How much you wanna bet Bibi Satanyahu has a hand in this war? And Evangelical Christians
will support Israel even if this war kills lots of Armenian Christians just like in
Syria.
Since this war in on Russia's doorstep Putin an Lavrov will try negotiations first then
what will they do next. Putin has vowed the war will never come to Russia which means Russia
will enter the theater on the anti-Zionist side.
Have you noticed every state within a few hundred miles of Israel is being torched and the
natives driven out?
Back again to Pepe Escobar's distortions of reality. Nagorno-Karabakh is an
Armenian-occupied Azerbaijani territory. In fact, no country in the world recognises it as an
"Independent" as Escobar likes to mislead us. Armenia should do the right thing and withdraw
its forces, including foreign militants from there. Like Israel, Armenia is playing the role
of a victim of a "holocaust".
Considering that the 2nd largest US/NWO Embassy in the World is in Armenia – a
country of 2.9 million people, and that the new President was put in power by the West
– the end game is to continue to surround Russia, screw up the New Silk Road, and be at
Iran's back door too. As said before , the domestic USA can totally look like the USSR in the
90s, but the NWO Foreign policy money is 100% – guaranteed. What do all those thousands
of workers in that huge Embassy compound do ?
Actually, once the Armenians were genocided , the Jewish bankers were the big shots left
in Turkey. H Morgenthau, our Turkish ambassador along with being jewish himself, wrote about
it in his reports. The Game hasn't changed much – it stays the same. Thanks.
About a third of Iran's population is Azeri. Should they develop interest in the conflict,
Iran may become involved. That would align Turkey and Iran vs Russia. That would be
something.
Damn right. We already have experience what happens when Turks get control of Christian
Armenians – systematic gang rapes and death marches are the rule of the day. Turks are
animals and letting them control any portion of Armenia is basically turning that place into
a concentration camp.
Fact: 1979 was the year that "big oil" LEGAL contracts were to expire and the "puppet"
Shah had threatened as early as 1973 (when he was instrumental in making OPEC a powerful
entity) that in 1979 Iran "would sell Iranian Oil to any buyer, at market prices".
Fact: Iran, in 1978 produced 6 million barrels per day. It has never been permitted to
reach those levels again.
Fact: Chinese, Indian, Syrian, Venezuelan, and God knows who else, all projects of the
Global Cabal have been getting Iranian Oil (under their engineered boxing of Iranian nation)
at levels that very likely are equal if not LOWER than the terms the Qajar idiots gave the
insatiablely greedy and slimey English.
And you did not mention that the only quarters of Smyrna/Izmir that were not torched in a
fire in 1922 were the Jewish and Turkish quarters – what a surprise! An antecedent to
9/11. Here is the Jewpedia hiding the real story – as usual.
The Armenian and Greek quarters were destroyed and the Jews got a monopoly on the
commerce. Done deal!
If the "colour revolution" assumptions were in force, there would be a host of
denunciations of Azerbaijan and Turkey (the latter perhaps the real prime mover in this) by
the USA and EU etc. There aren't. The USA and EU may even tacitly support the Azerbaijanis,
perhaps they hope the Russians and Iranians will become entangled in this affair and so
forth.
How about swapping Nagorno-Karabakh for North Cyprus. I am sure the Greeks would be very
happy to live with the Armenians. But the Sultan's dreams of owning the Eastern Mediterranean
would come to naught.
Stalin did nasty things like that to keep the republics feuding with each other rather
than pushing back against Moscow. The mixed-up borders of the 'stans, further east, are
testament to this. Fergana Valley?
Divide and rule. Still costing lives in pointless wars almost 100 years later.
At stake is the very existence of the Armenian people. Turkey is trying to finish what
remains of them after the genocide last century. Both Erdoghan and Aliev have stated, that
they want a "final solution" to the "Armenian problem".
Exactly. The history of Turkey since 1880-s is full of ethnic cleansings and genocides of
the non-muslim people such as Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians.
My thanks to Escobar for taking on a subject rather obviously not susceptible to 2,700
word essays, along with attention worthy links.
His biases are not my own but he's thoughtful and certainly doesn't hide them.
In this and so many other incidents we can see how thoroughly Trump has moved the American
ship of state despite the relentless efforts of foreign and domestic resistance to neutralize
America First and destroy him.
It's really quite something the way Obama's presidency in all its disastrous fullness has
been memory-holed. The defense of it being that it merely extended Bush's world-historical
incompetence and malefactions.
Could you have turned US unipolarity following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
Warsaw Pact into a "moment" if you tried? I couldn't.
You will be way ahead of most everyone if you get your mind around that and the
geopolitical sad story that is CCP China winning the post-Cold War quarter-century hands
down.
We inevitably come back to the point that the whole drama can be interpreted from the
perspective of a NATO geopolitical hit against Russia – according to quite a few
analyses circulating at the Duma.
Ukraine is an absolute black hole. There's the Belarus impasse. Covid-19. The Navalny
circus. The "threat" to Nord Stream-2.
To pull Russia back into the Armenia-Azerbaijan drama means turning Moscow's attention
towards the Caucasus . . .
I confess that I get no end of enjoyment over bellyaching on behalf of those powers the
Obama administration was turning the world over to. Nord Stream II was merely the down
payment on Russia's assistance/acquiescence in throwing the electron to Hillary, with the sky
the limit for China, Russia and Iran once Democrats and their foreign allies had neutralized
free and fair elections.
Now all of these powers must deal with a real POTUS who asks "What have you done for the
US lately?"
The USG and Russia have cooperated where geopolitical interests align. More will follow
once Trump takes the oath again. As I've explained previously, despite its high-risk position
in the Resistance matrix, Russia/Putin have (unsurprisingly, to me) acted skillfully and with
circumspection.
The same cannot be said for Iran. Nor China, particularly since the end of last year.
The aggravation of the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh has raised a number of questions. In
particular, why Moscow is in no hurry to stand up for Armenia and why it does not sharply
criticize
Azerbaijan. The answer is that Moscow and Baku have very close relations, and not only
economic relations. So what is the value and irreplaceability of Azerbaijan for
Russia?
Border and population changes are in order. A quarter of N-K goes back to Azerbaijan and
the rest closer to Armenia proper plus the capital city goes to Armenia with a 50 mile wide
band connecting it with the rest of Armenia. The Azeris get the rest of their lands now
occupied by the Armenians. Will it happen? Probably not, just look at Kosovo..
There is a province between Ngorno Karabakh and Armenia proper of roughly of the same size
belonging to Azerbaijan, so why not just exchange it with each other to avoid further
conflict and bloodshed?
There is no guarantee that Turkey will not try to then eliminate whatever remains of
Armenia.
Remember, Turkey genocided Armenians and wiped out close to 80% of them in 1915 through
1922. Armenian populated areas stretched from what is now Armenia until the shores of Eastern
Mediterranean. The only thing that is left of it is Kessab in modern day Syria.
@Ghali nial borders are fake, false and fraudulent, whether in Asia or Africa. Over time,
justice will prevail and borders will reflect the ethno-national composition of its long-term
inhabitants.
That said, the current regime in Yerevan needs to be overthrown, as it was established in
conjunction with the interests of the Cabal/Nato and their various puppet regimes. Armenia is
the oldest Orthodox Christian nation in the world and was severely genocided by the Donmeh
covert Jewish Masons who called themselves the "Young Turks" who were led by Enver Pasha.
By the way, who are you, Ghali? Do you have a dog in the fight? Are you connected with an
intel agency?
Excellent article, normally I pass over Pepe for the naughty articles on Unz but I might
have to take another look.
My only critique is that the article feels pro-Azeri but that's balanced with an
informative description how this started in July, including an accurate appraisal of Turkish
behavior.
I'm not Azeri or Armenian so I didn't have a dog in this fight until I noticed Israel's
support for Azerbaijan. It's nothing personal, I have only one hate.
Jewish Bankers shifting profits to other Jewish bankers. Funding all sides and profiting
from the mass graves again. 5000 years and nothing has changed.
The Turks are the US Army in this – with their proxy armies sent to help the
Azerbaijanis, just like the US Army /Israelis and their proxies Isis, al Nusra, al Qaeda etc.
in Syria. The US and their 6000 employees at the Embassy, don't have to say anything –
they back both sides – just like the Zionists do – in the US political parties.
Things don't change , Tactics don't change. Thanks.
You are asking him if he has a dog in this fight? What about yourself? You very clearly
have a dog in this fight yourself, haven`t you?
Try to cut down on the hypocrasy, why don`t you, and at the same time maybe moderate your
"holier than thou" attitude.
Obviously the large multinational corporations are not in fact in charge, and will meekly follow the edict of national-security
bureaucrats even as it harms their bottom line.
"... "the EU and Russia find common cause to limit Azerbaijani gains (in large part because Erdogan is no one's favorite guy, not just because of this but because of the Eastern Med, Syria, Libya)." ..."
"... "Iran favors Armenia, which is counter-intuitive at first sight. So the Iranians may help the Russians out (funneling supplies), but on the other hand they have a good relationship with Turkey, especially in the oil and gas smuggling business. And if they get too overt in their support, Trump has a casus belli to get involved and the Europeans may not like to end up on the same side as the Russians and the Iranians. It just looks bad. And the Europeans hate to look bad." ..."
It's important to remember that there was no "Azerbaijan" nation-state until the early
1920s. Historically, Azerbaijan is a territory in northern Iran. Azeris are very well
integrated within the Islamic Republic. So the Republic of Azerbaijan actually borrowed its
name from their Iranian neighbors. In ancient history, the territory of the new 20
th century republic was known as Atropatene, and Aturpakatan before the advent of
Islam.
How the equation changed
Baku's main argument is that Armenia is blocking a contiguous Azerbaijani nation, as a look
in the map shows us that southwest Azerbaijan is de facto split all the way to the Iranian
border.
And that plunges us necessarily into deep background. To clarify matters, there could not be
a more reliable guide than a top Caucasus think tank expert who shared his analysis with me by
email, but is insistent on "no attribution". Let's call him Mr. C.
Mr. C notes that, "for decades, the equation remained the same and the variables in the
equation remained the same, more or less. This was the case notwithstanding the fact that
Armenia is an unstable democracy in transition and Azerbaijan had much more continuity at the
top."
We should all be aware that "Azerbaijan lost territory right at the beginning of the
restoration of its statehood, when it was basically a failed state run by armchair nationalist
amateurs [before Heydar Aliyev, Ilham's father, came to power]. And Armenia was a mess, too but
less so when you take into consideration that it had strong Russian support and Azerbaijan had
no one. Back in the day, Turkey was still a secular state with a military that looked West and
took its NATO membership seriously. Since then, Azerbaijan has built up its economy and
increased its population. So it kept getting stronger. But its military was still
underperforming."
That slowly started to change in 2020: "Basically, in the past few months you've seen
incremental increases in the intensity of near daily ceasefire violations (the near-daily
violations are nothing new: they've been going on for years). So this blew up in July and there
was a shooting war for a few days. Then everyone calmed down again."
All this time, something important was developing in the background: Armenian Prime Minister
Nikol Pashinyan, who came to power in May 2018, and Aliyev started to talk: "The Azerbaijani
side thought this indicated Armenia was ready for compromise (this all started when Armenia had
a sort of revolution, with the new PM coming in with a popular mandate to clean house
domestically). For whatever reason, it ended up not happening."
What happened in fact was the July shooting war.
Don't forget Pipelineistan
Armenian PM Pashinyan could be described as a liberal globalist. The majority of his
political team is pro-NATO. Pashinyan went all guns blazing against former Armenian President
(1998- 2008) Robert Kocharian, who before that happened to be, crucially, the de facto
President of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Kocharian, who spent years in Russia and is close to President Putin, was charged with a
nebulous attempt at "overthrowing the constitutional order". Pashinyan tried to land him in
jail. But even more crucial is the fact that Pashinyan refused to follow a plan elaborated by
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to finally settle the Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh mess.
In the current fog of war, things are even messier. Mr. C stresses two points: "First,
Armenia asked for CSTO protection and got bitch slapped, hard and in public; second, Armenia
threatened to bomb the oil and gas pipelines in Azerbaijan (there are several, they all run
parallel, and they supply not just Georgia and Turkey but now the Balkans and Italy). With
regards to the latter, Azerbaijan basically said: if you do that, we'll bomb your nuclear
reactor."
The Pipelineistan angle is indeed crucial: for years I have followed on Asia Times
these myriad, interlocking oil and gas soap operas, especially the BTC (Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan),
conceived by Zbigniew Brzezinski to bypass Iran. I was even "arrested" by a BP 4X4 when I was
tracking the pipeline on a parallel side road out of the massive Sangachal terminal: that
proved British Petroleum was in practice the real boss, not the Azerbaijani government.
In sum, now we have reached the point where, according to Mr. C,
"Armenia's saber rattling got more aggressive." Reasons, on the Armenian side, seem to be
mostly domestic: terrible handling of Covid-19 (in contrast to Azerbaijan), and the dire state
of the economy. So, says Mr. C, we came to a toxic concourse of circumstances: Armenia
deflected from its problems by being tough on Azerbaijan, while Azerbaijan just had had
enough.
It's always about Turkey
Anyway one looks at the Armenia-Azerbaijan drama, the key destabilizing factor is now
Turkey.
Mr. C notes how, "throughout the summer, the quality of the Turkish-Azerbaijani military
exercises increased (both prior to July events and subsequently). The Azerbaijani military got
a lot better. Also, since the fourth quarter of 2019 the President of Azerbaijan has been
getting rid of the (perceived) pro-Russian elements in positions of power." See, for instance,
here
.
There's no way to confirm it either with Moscow or Ankara, but Mr. C advances what President
Erdogan may have told the Russians: "We'll go into Armenia directly if a) Azerbaijan starts to
lose, b) Russia goes in or accepts CSTO to be invoked or something along those lines, or c)
Armenia goes after the pipelines. All are reasonable red lines for the Turks, especially when
you factor in the fact that they don't like the Armenians very much and that they consider the
Azerbaijanis brothers."
It's crucial to remember that in August, Baku and Ankara held two weeks of joint air and
land military exercises. Baku has bought advanced drones from both Turkey and Israel. There's
no smokin' gun, at least not yet, but Ankara may have hired up
to 4,000 Salafi-jihadis in Syria to fight -- wait for it -- in favor of Shi'ite-majority
Azerbaijan, proving once again that "jihadism" is all about making a quick buck.
The United Armenian Information Center, as well as the Kurdish Afrin Post, have stated that
Ankara opened two recruitment centers -- in Afrin schools -- for mercenaries. Apparently this
has been a quite popular move because Ankara slashed salaries for Syrian mercenaries shipped to
Libya.
There's an extra angle that is deeply worrying not only for Russia but also for Central
Asia. According to the former Foreign Minister of Nagorno-Karabakh, Ambassador Extraordinary
Arman Melikyan, mercenaries using Azeri IDs issued in Baku may be able to infiltrate Dagestan
and Chechnya and, via the Caspian, reach Atyrau in Kazakhstan, from where they can easily reach
Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
That's the ultimate nightmare of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) -- shared by
Russia, China and the Central Asian "stans": a jihadi land -- and (Caspian) sea -- bridge from
the Caucasus all the way to Central Asia, and even Xinjiang.
What's the point of this war?
So what happens next? A nearly insurmountable impasse, as Mr. C outlines it:
1. "The peace talks are going nowhere because Armenia is refusing to budge (to withdraw from
occupying Nagorno-Karabakh plus 7 surrounding regions in phases or all at once, with the usual
guarantees for civilians, even settlers -- note that when they went in in the early 1990s they
cleansed those lands of literally all Azerbaijanis, something like between 700,000 and 1
million people)."
2. Aliyev was under the impression that Pashinyan "was willing to compromise and began
preparing his people and then looked like someone with egg on his face when it didn't
happen."
3. "Turkey has made it crystal clear it will support Azerbaijan unconditionally, and has
matched those words with deeds."
4. "In such circumstances, Russia got outplayed -- in the sense that they had been able to
play off Armenia against Azerbaijan and vice versa, quite successfully, helping to mediate
talks that went nowhere, preserving the status quo that effectively favored Armenia."
And that brings us to the crucial question. What's the point of this war?
Mr. C: "It is either to conquer as much as possible before the "international community" [in
this case, the UNSC] calls for / demands a ceasefire or to do so as an impetus for re-starting
talks that actually lead to progress. In either scenario, Azerbaijan will end up with gains and
Armenia with losses. How much and under what circumstances (the status and question of
Nagorno-Karabakh is distinct from the status and question of the Armenian occupied territories
around Nagorno-Karabakh) is unknown: i.e. on the field of battle or the negotiating table or a
combo of both. However this turns out, at a minimum Azerbaijan will get to keep what it
liberated in battle. This will be the new starting point. And I suspect that Azerbaijan will do
no harm to the Armenian civilians that stay. They'll be model liberators. And they'll take time
to bring back Azerbaijani civilians (refugees/IDPs) to their homes, especially in areas that
would become mixed as a result of return."
So what can Moscow do under these circumstances? Not much,
"except to go into Azerbaijan proper, which they won't do (there's no land border between
Russia and Armenia; so although Russia has a military base in Armenia with one or more thousand
troops, they can't just supply Armenia with guns and troops at will, given the geography)."
Crucially, Moscow privileges the strategic partnership with Armenia -- which is a member of
the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) -- while meticulously monitoring each and every NATO-member
Turkey's movement: after all, they are already in opposing sides in both Libya and Syria.
So, to put it mildly, Moscow is walking on a geopolitical razor's edge. Russia needs to
exercise restraint and invest in a carefully calibrated balancing act between Armenia and
Azerbaijan; must preserve the Russia-Turkey strategic partnership; and must be alert to all,
possible US Divide and Rule tactics.
Inside Erdogan's war
So in the end this would be yet another Erdogan war?
The inescapable Follow the Money analysis would tells us, yes. The Turkish economy is an
absolute mess, with high inflation and a depreciating currency. Baku has a wealth of oil-gas
funds that could become readily available -- adding to Ankara's dream of turning Turkey also
into an energy supplier.
Mr. C adds that anchoring Turkey in Azerbaijan would lead to "the creation of full-fledged
Turkish military bases and the inclusion of Azerbaijan in the Turkish orbit of influence (the
"two countries -- one nation" thesis, in which Turkey assumes supremacy) within the framework
of neo-Ottomanism and Turkey's leadership in the Turkic-speaking world."
Add to it the all-important NATO angle. Mr. C essentially sees it as Erdogan, enabled by
Washington, about to make a NATO push to the east while establishing that immensely dangerous
jihadi channel into Russia: "This is no local adventure by Erdogan. I understand that
Azerbaijan is largely Shi'ite Islam and that will complicate things but not render his
adventure impossible."
This totally ties in with a notorious RAND
report that explicitly details how "the United States could try to induce Armenia to break
with Russia" and "encourage Armenia to move fully into the NATO orbit."
It's beyond obvious that Moscow is observing all these variables with extreme care. That is
reflected, for instance, in how irrepressible Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova,
earlier this week, has packaged a very serious diplomatic warning: "The downing of an Armenian
SU-25 by a Turkish F-16, as claimed by the Ministry of Defense in Armenia, seems to complicate
the situation, as Moscow, based on the Tashkent treaty, is obligated to offer military
assistance to Armenia".
It's no wonder both Baku and Yerevan got the message and are firmly denying anything
happened.
The key fact remains that as long as Armenia proper is not attacked by Azerbaijan, Russia
will not apply the CSTO treaty and step in. Erdogan knows this is his red line. Moscow has all
it takes to put him in serious trouble -- as in shutting off gas supplies to Turkey. Moscow,
meanwhile, will keep helping Yerevan with intel and hardware -- flown in from Iran. Diplomacy
rules -- and the ultimate target is yet another ceasefire.
Pulling Russia back in
Mr. C advances the strong possibility -- and I have heard echoes from Brussels -- that
"the EU and Russia find common cause to limit Azerbaijani gains (in large part because
Erdogan is no one's favorite guy, not just because of this but because of the Eastern Med,
Syria, Libya)."
That brings to the forefront the renewed importance of the UNSC in imposing a ceasefire.
Washington's role at the moment is quite intriguing. Of course, Trump has more important things
to do at the moment. Moreover, the Armenian diaspora in the US swings drastically
pro-Democrat.
Then, to round it all up, there's the all-important Iran-Armenia relationship. Here
is a forceful attempt to put it in perspective.
As Mr. C stresses, "Iran favors Armenia, which is counter-intuitive at first sight. So
the Iranians may help the Russians out (funneling supplies), but on the other hand they have
a good relationship with Turkey, especially in the oil and gas smuggling business. And if
they get too overt in their support, Trump has a casus belli to get involved and the
Europeans may not like to end up on the same side as the Russians and the Iranians. It just
looks bad. And the Europeans hate to look bad."
We inevitably come back to the point that the whole drama can be interpreted from the
perspective of a NATO geopolitical hit against Russia -- according to quite a few analyses
circulating at the Duma.
Ukraine is an absolute black hole. There's the Belarus impasse. Covid-19. The Navalny
circus. The "threat" to Nord Stream-2.
To pull Russia back into the Armenia-Azerbaijan drama means turning Moscow's attention
towards the Caucasus so there's more Turkish freedom of action in other theaters -- in the
Eastern Mediterranean versus Greece, in Syria, in Libya. Ankara -- foolishly -- is engaged in
simultaneous wars on several fronts, and with virtually no allies.
What this means is that even more than NATO, monopolizing Russia's attention in the Caucasus
most of all may be profitable for Erdogan himself. As Mr. C stresses, "in this situation, the
Nagorno-Karabakh leverage/'trump card' in the hands of Turkey would be useful for negotiations
with Russia."
And I suspect that Azerbaijan will do no harm to the Armenian civilians that stay.
They’ll be model liberators. And they’ll take time to bring back Azerbaijani
civilians (refugees/IDPs) to their homes, especially in areas that would become mixed as a
result of return.”
Agreed, this is rubbish. “Mr. C” – assuming someone like this even
exists, is either terribly misinformed or an outright liar. Basically, if we follow
Escobar’s logic, Armenian’s are making a mistake by not agreeing to surrender
their lives to the peace loving and rather humanistic dictatorship of Azerbaijan. While he
touches on some relevant points, overall, Escobar has not done his homework and has come up
with quite a bit of drivel.
Pepe, you didn’t mention the Armenian Genocide, the Greek Genocide, the Assyrian
Genocide, all perpetrated by Turkey.
Why not? Would the Azeris, all Turks, be different? You say the Azeris if they won, Turks,
would treat the Armenian population nicely. Huh?
I remember from Runciman’s book on the First Crusade that the Turks had already
taken over much of Anatolia but he seems to mention Armenians at every turn (from
memory—don’t have the book handy).
My impression is that before the Genocide the Armenians were all over Anatolia. There was
a narrow coastal strip at the western end that was historically part of Greece, and many
different peoples of Asia Minor are mentioned in the NT, but they arguably were all
Armenians, making the Armenians the indigenous people of Anatolia.
How is it that Turkey was allowed to keep part of Europe after WWI when they were losers?
And did they keep faith? Is the current St Sophia turmoil the norm of Turkish good faith?
Time for all the Turks to get out of Anatolia, give it back to Armenia, and head for
Azerbigan.
@Yevardian having been disciplined for some years now is, once again, at the throat of
the west. Europe spent millions of lives and huge resources throwing the Moors out last time.
If they don’t take a stand and support Armenia they may very well have to do it again.
As far as the mythical Mr C is concerned he comes across, to me, as yet another apologist for
the Religion of Peace. Obviously cucked NATO will not help Armenia, they have neither the
intestinal fortitude nor the will, so it will be left to Russia and the Visigrad nations, in
the mean time Turkey is attempting to take Greek territory, Syrian territory, Libyan
territory and anything else that it can get it’s mitts on and the West does absolutely
nothing. This will not end well.
I think few Armenian civilians will take the chance but I very much doubt Azerbaijanis
will be “model liberators”. The new Azerbaijani state was born from the Sumgait
and Baku pogroms. I also don’t think they will delay in moving Azeris into areas
formerly inhabited by Armenians – their role model Erdoğan has been trying to
change facts on the ground by moving ethnic Turks into Kurdish areas in his own country.
@Ann Nonny Mouse deavor, even if they were the majority, though most accounts say they
were 40%.
I would strongly urge the Armenians to get off their nationalist high horse and solve the
problem diplomatically and learn to live with their neighbors. Super nationalism is a
dangerous and fake mantra that usually leads to disaster. My understanding was that the
Azeris and Armenians always got along before this debacle. They should try to work out things
and get back to a their original multi-cultural paradigm, that is living side by side instead
of fighting and dying over territory and national flags. Live is short and when we pass to
the other side you dont carry your flag with you.
The Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence in 1991: but that was not
recognized by the “international community”
Just to throw in quickly that if Kosovo is “recognized”, then bleeding
Karabakh should also long since have been recognized. Especially since the Armenians have an
actual holocaust in their 20th century past.
So, seems like the way to get sympathy to rob territory is to make full use of any
“genocide” one had suffered as excuse…. worked very well ( in fact,
spectacularly well) so faR with the Chosen ones….
Well i admittedly dont know enough about the situation to try to critique this piece as
some of the other comments on here… But i am skeptical about Armenia and their stated
intent. If it is reallly about protecting an ethnic group – then why not offer them
citizenship to move into your territory??? That would lead me to believe it is more about
land and resources…
Yeah i dont know the nitty gritty in this conflict – but i do agree Edrogan seems to
be biting off more than he can chew… He has too many pots on the fire it seems. Kurds
– Qatar/Saudis – Libya – Syria – Greece – Cyprus – and
now this..?
Aside from refusing to participate against their Muslim cousins (Afghanistan, Libya),
Turkey is using NATO doctrine quite effectively. It is a useful bullet prove vest for
Erdogan. The Brussels morons will be sorry for not expelling Turkey from their military club
long time ago.
@Ann Nonny Mouse iven to the Syrian desert AFTER some of them had aligned with the
Russians who were about to invade eastern Anatolia in 1915. Similarly, most of Crimean Tatars
were expelled from Crimea AFTER some of them had aligned with the invading Germans in 1941.
As another comparison, American-Japanese living at the Pacific coast were banished to camps
in the interior AFTER the Japanese army had attacked Pearl Harbor and not before.
When a group of people kill or drive out another group it’s usually not for the fun of
it but rather due to necessities of survival, whatever evil that might require at that
particular time depending on the particular circumstances.
It would be interesting to read a scholarly exposition on what the USSR and governments in
Eastern Europe proper did or did not do to educate people away from their ancient hatreds,
and why whatever they did do appears not to have been particularly successful. Or was it
mostly successful and the hatreds were much more intense before 1917?
The entire Jewish American lobby and Israel are on Azerbaijan’s side and
anti-Armenian, just as when they were working with Turkey to deny the Armenian genocide.
Israel has also sold billions of dollars of weapons to Azerbaijan which the latter is
using against Armenians. Israel gets oil from Azerbaijan
Of course, Azerbaijan and Turkey have imported jihadists from Syria and Libya to fight
Christian Armenians now.
Apparently, Pepe, you and the Jewish lobby, Israel, Turkey, and the jihadists are on the
same side.
Congratulations.
P.S. It would take a hundred pages to list all the factual errors you made. For example,
Armenians were still the clear majority in Artsakh/Karabagh in 1988 and 1991. Armenians there
had been grossly mistreated by Azerbaijan for decades.
The fighting occurred in the late 1980s only because Azerbaijan, backed by the Russian
military, killed and harrassed Armenians. The Azeris also committed massacres of Armenians
who were living in Baku and Sumgait in the late 1980s.
Stalin also placed Nakhichevan, an Armenian territory, inside Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan kicked out every Armenian from Nakhichevan. Azerbaijan was doing that to
Artsakh/Karabagh too.
No wonder Artsakh voted to be independent from Azerbaijan, something you don’t want
to understand.
Better luck next time trying to fool readers, Pepe.
The key fact remains that as long as Armenia proper is not attacked by Azerbaijan,
Russia will not apply the CSTO treaty and step in. Erdogan knows this is his red line.
Moscow has all it takes to put him in serious trouble – as in shutting off gas
supplies to Turkey.
Russia isn’t going to shut off gas to Turkey. Russia never does that (shutting off
gas). It’s a Western canard.
Russia could, however, impose a no-fly-zone over Georgia, effectively blocking resupply
and reinforcements to Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is almost completely surrounded by Russian
allies and bases. They rely on Georgia for military transit.
Ignorant post. Armenian nationalist were active in Russia prior to ww1, then supported
Russian entrance into Turkish territory because they shared a religion. They stabbed the
ottomans , of which they were a big part, in the back. The young Turks , who were actually
donmeh jews, had them marched off to Syria and lebanon, etc, causing many deaths! The
Armenian is still causing trouble for the Turks. They sided with the mongols in their battles
against the Muslims, along wit the Georgians, repeatedly. More to a small story
What’s going to happen to USA? The poverty and racial intolerance ,both seem to be
undermining the stability and the ideological integrity of the country . I see many states
emerging from the body of America.But the problems will not be resolved . It might just like
like Caucasian territory or Balkan .
1. BTC is described as ‘bypassing Iran’. One could easily argue it also
bypasses *Russia* . Perhaps that’s what made it necessary for Soros & others to
peel Georgia off from Russian control back in the day? Look how Russia responded by
recapturing the Georgian Military Highway (South Ossetia).
2. Look in general at how Russia is willing to give up huge areas of territory so long as
she keeps key strategic points of control: South Ossetia, Crimea, Transnistria, Abkhazia
and… Armenia. Smell the coffee.
3. 2. ‘Mr. C’ is quick to mention Baku/Ankara joint exercises in August, but
fails to mention Kavkas 2020 exercises led by Russia. Uh duh.
4. ‘Mr. C’ seems to ignore the fact that Armenia couldn’t have taken
that territory in first place, or kept it, w/out Russian assistance. And idea ‘Russia
can do nothing’ is absurd. As is the idea that Russia can’t supply Armenia
because there’s no land connection. Did the allies have any problem keeping West Berlin
supplied by air? Of course not. All nonsense.
5. The idea that there is a ‘Russia/Turkey’ strategic partnership is also
silly. Where is this partnership? Turkey buying S-400s? So what? Are they in partnership in
Syria? In Libya? No. So why would they be in N-K?
6. Weird. No mention of China and it’s growing relationship with Turkey. This
probably tells you all you need to know about the author. Unless of course the author is just
a fool, which is also possible.
“Yet even before the collapse the Azerbaijani Army and Armenian independentists were
already at war (1988-1994), which yielded a grim balance of 30,000 dead and roughly a million
wounded.”
This is a wounded-to-killed ratio of thirty-three to one. Doesn’t make sense.
Were Russia to be as devious and underhanded as the puppet regime in the Di$trict of
Corruption, they would arrange for an overthrow of the present NATO/EU/U$ regime in Yerevan.
With those bastards out of the way and Armenia no longer playing double jeopardy, it might be
possible for a new Orthodox oriented Armenian government to come to some sort of arrangement
with Baku.
At the same time, perhaps Syrian spetsnaz units could practice some infiltration tactics
into Turkish semi-occupied “greater” Idlib and Ghurka style, behead a few Turkish
officers running the show there.
“Sultan” Erdogan is playing loose and wild with his shattering economy and
massive military. It is high time he was given a black-eye–one that would cause him to
lose face among his own countrymen.
This is my educated guess, the Anglo-Zionists led by Rothschild and Netanayahu destablize
the oil in the Middle East to keep their prices of oil in USD above 100 $/barrel
They have also blown up oil derricks in the North Sea, shut down Iranian and Iraq and
Syria oil production. The game is clear, low oil prices are being met with wiping out the
competition.
And causing hell in Iran and Venezueala. Back in 1954 Operation Ajax took out Mossadeq and
installed the Shah – puppet of big oil. Before it was BP it was the Persian Gulf Oil
Co. BP is owned mostly by the crown.
Trump’s secretary of state was Rex Tillerson CEO Exxon just like GW Bush picked
Condoleeza Rice CEO Chevron to be his national security advisor.
The Israel angle is to get Iran and to goad Russia into war with the USA, the eventually
goal is that USA-Russia-China are reduced while Jews rule the world from Jerusalem.
How much you wanna bet Bibi Satanyahu has a hand in this war? And Evangelical Christians
will support Israel even if this war kills lots of Armenian Christians just like in
Syria.
Since this war in on Russia’s doorstep Putin an Lavrov will try negotiations first
then what will they do next. Putin has vowed the war will never come to Russia which means
Russia will enter the theater on the anti-Zionist side.
Have you noticed every state within a few hundred miles of Israel is being torched and the
natives driven out?
Back again to Pepe Escobar’s distortions of reality. Nagorno-Karabakh is an
Armenian-occupied Azerbaijani territory. In fact, no country in the world recognises it as an
“Independent” as Escobar likes to mislead us. Armenia should do the right thing
and withdraw its forces, including foreign militants from there. Like Israel, Armenia is
playing the role of a victim of a “holocaust”.
Considering that the 2nd largest US/NWO Embassy in the World is in Armenia – a
country of 2.9 million people, and that the new President was put in power by the West
– the end game is to continue to surround Russia, screw up the New Silk Road, and be at
Iran’s back door too. As said before , the domestic USA can totally look like the USSR
in the 90s, but the NWO Foreign policy money is 100% – guaranteed. What do all those
thousands of workers in that huge Embassy compound do ?
Actually, once the Armenians were genocided , the Jewish bankers were the big shots left
in Turkey. H Morgenthau, our Turkish ambassador along with being jewish himself, wrote about
it in his reports. The Game hasn’t changed much – it stays the same. Thanks.
About a third of Iran’s population is Azeri. Should they develop interest in the
conflict, Iran may become involved. That would align Turkey and Iran vs Russia. That would be
something.
Damn right. We already have experience what happens when Turks get control of Christian
Armenians – systematic gang rapes and death marches are the rule of the day. Turks are
animals and letting them control any portion of Armenia is basically turning that place into
a concentration camp.
Fact: 1979 was the year that “big oil” LEGAL contracts were to expire and the
“puppet” Shah had threatened as early as 1973 (when he was instrumental in making
OPEC a powerful entity) that in 1979 Iran “would sell Iranian Oil to any buyer, at
market prices”.
Fact: Iran, in 1978 produced 6 million barrels per day. It has never been permitted to
reach those levels again.
Fact: Chinese, Indian, Syrian, Venezuelan, and God knows who else, all projects of the
Global Cabal have been getting Iranian Oil (under their engineered boxing of Iranian nation)
at levels that very likely are equal if not LOWER than the terms the Qajar idiots gave the
insatiablely greedy and slimey English.
And you did not mention that the only quarters of Smyrna/Izmir that were not torched in a
fire in 1922 were the Jewish and Turkish quarters – what a surprise! An antecedent to
9/11. Here is the Jewpedia hiding the real story – as usual.
The Armenian and Greek quarters were destroyed and the Jews got a monopoly on the
commerce. Done deal!
If the “colour revolution” assumptions were in force, there would be a host of
denunciations of Azerbaijan and Turkey (the latter perhaps the real prime mover in this) by
the USA and EU etc. There aren’t. The USA and EU may even tacitly support the
Azerbaijanis, perhaps they hope the Russians and Iranians will become entangled in this
affair and so forth.
How about swapping Nagorno-Karabakh for North Cyprus. I am sure the Greeks would be very
happy to live with the Armenians. But the Sultan’s dreams of owning the Eastern
Mediterranean would come to naught.
Stalin did nasty things like that to keep the republics feuding with each other rather
than pushing back against Moscow. The mixed-up borders of the ‘stans, further east, are
testament to this. Fergana Valley?
Divide and rule. Still costing lives in pointless wars almost 100 years later.
At stake is the very existence of the Armenian people. Turkey is trying to finish what
remains of them after the genocide last century. Both Erdoghan and Aliev have stated, that
they want a “final solution” to the “Armenian problem”.
Exactly. The history of Turkey since 1880-s is full of ethnic cleansings and genocides of
the non-muslim people such as Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians.
My thanks to Escobar for taking on a subject rather obviously not susceptible to 2,700
word essays, along with attention worthy links.
His biases are not my own but he’s thoughtful and certainly doesn’t hide
them.
In this and so many other incidents we can see how thoroughly Trump has moved the American
ship of state despite the relentless efforts of foreign and domestic resistance to neutralize
America First and destroy him.
It’s really quite something the way Obama’s presidency in all its disastrous
fullness has been memory-holed. The defense of it being that it merely extended Bush’s
world-historical incompetence and malefactions.
Could you have turned US unipolarity following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
Warsaw Pact into a “moment” if you tried? I couldn’t.
You will be way ahead of most everyone if you get your mind around that and the
geopolitical sad story that is CCP China winning the post-Cold War quarter-century hands
down.
We inevitably come back to the point that the whole drama can be interpreted from the
perspective of a NATO geopolitical hit against Russia – according to quite a few
analyses circulating at the Duma.
Ukraine is an absolute black hole. There’s the Belarus impasse. Covid-19. The
Navalny circus. The “threat” to Nord Stream-2.
To pull Russia back into the Armenia-Azerbaijan drama means turning Moscow’s
attention towards the Caucasus . . .
I confess that I get no end of enjoyment over bellyaching on behalf of those powers the
Obama administration was turning the world over to. Nord Stream II was merely the down
payment on Russia’s assistance/acquiescence in throwing the electron to Hillary, with
the sky the limit for China, Russia and Iran once Democrats and their foreign allies had
neutralized free and fair elections.
Now all of these powers must deal with a real POTUS who asks “What have you done for
the US lately?”
The USG and Russia have cooperated where geopolitical interests align. More will follow
once Trump takes the oath again. As I’ve explained previously, despite its high-risk
position in the Resistance matrix, Russia/Putin have (unsurprisingly, to me) acted skillfully
and with circumspection.
The same cannot be said for Iran. Nor China, particularly since the end of last year.
The aggravation of the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh has raised a number of questions. In
particular, why Moscow is in no hurry to stand up for Armenia and why it does not sharply
criticize
Azerbaijan. The answer is that Moscow and Baku have very close relations, and not only
economic relations. So what is the value and irreplaceability of Azerbaijan for
Russia?
Border and population changes are in order. A quarter of N-K goes back to Azerbaijan and
the rest closer to Armenia proper plus the capital city goes to Armenia with a 50 mile wide
band connecting it with the rest of Armenia. The Azeris get the rest of their lands now
occupied by the Armenians. Will it happen? Probably not, just look at Kosovo..
There is a province between Ngorno Karabakh and Armenia proper of roughly of the same size
belonging to Azerbaijan, so why not just exchange it with each other to avoid further
conflict and bloodshed?
There is no guarantee that Turkey will not try to then eliminate whatever remains of
Armenia.
Remember, Turkey genocided Armenians and wiped out close to 80% of them in 1915 through
1922. Armenian populated areas stretched from what is now Armenia until the shores of Eastern
Mediterranean. The only thing that is left of it is Kessab in modern day Syria.
@Ghali e fake, false and fraudulent, whether in Asia or Africa. Over time, justice will
prevail and borders will reflect the ethno-national composition of its long-term inhabitants.
That said, the current regime in Yerevan needs to be overthrown, as it was established in
conjunction with the interests of the Cabal/Nato and their various puppet regimes. Armenia is
the oldest Orthodox Christian nation in the world and was severely genocided by the Donmeh
covert Jewish Masons who called themselves the “Young Turks” who were led by
Enver Pasha.
By the way, who are you, Ghali? Do you have a dog in the fight? Are you connected with an
intel agency?
Excellent article, normally I pass over Pepe for the naughty articles on Unz but I might
have to take another look.
My only critique is that the article feels pro-Azeri but that’s balanced with an
informative description how this started in July, including an accurate appraisal of Turkish
behavior.
I’m not Azeri or Armenian so I didn’t have a dog in this fight until I noticed
Israel’s support for Azerbaijan. It’s nothing personal, I have only one hate.
Jewish Bankers shifting profits to other Jewish bankers. Funding all sides and profiting
from the mass graves again. 5000 years and nothing has changed.
The Turks are the US Army in this – with their proxy armies sent to help the
Azerbaijanis, just like the US Army /Israelis and their proxies Isis, al Nusra, al Qaeda etc.
in Syria. The US and their 6000 employees at the Embassy, don’t have to say anything
– they back both sides – just like the Zionists do – in the US political
parties. Things don’t change , Tactics don’t change. Thanks.
You are asking him if he has a dog in this fight? What about yourself? You very clearly
have a dog in this fight yourself, haven`t you?
Try to cut down on the hypocrasy, why don`t you, and at the same time maybe moderate your
“holier than thou” attitude.
US regime in this last forty years since the Iranian revolution has been totally
successful making majority Iranian people anywhere in the world understand that the US is
their chronic strategic enemy for decades to come, in mean time, US regime has been equally
as successful in making American people believe Iran is their enemy.
The difference between the two sides belief is, Iranian people by experiencing US regime'
conducts came to their belief, but the American people' belief was made by their own regime'
propaganda machinery. For this reason just like the people to people relation between the US
and Russian people Before and after the fall of USSR the relation between US and Iran in next
few generations will not come or even develop to anything substantial or meaningful. One can
see this same trajectory in US Chinese relations, or US Cuban. Noticeably all these countries
relation with US become terminally irreparable after their revolutions, regardless of
maturity or termination of their revolution.
As much as US loves color revolutions, US hates real revolutions.
The highlands of Nagorno-Karabakh are ethnically Armenian. The light blue districts were
originally Azeri but have been ethically cleansed during the war in the early 1990s.
Turkey is supporting Azerbaijan by supplying it with Turkish drones and with 'moderate Syrian
rebel' mercenaries
from Syrian and Libya . All are flown in through Georgian air space. Other mercenaries seem
to come from
Afghanistan . Additional hardware comes by road also through
Georgia. Another supporter of the attacker is Israel. During the last week Azerbaijani military
transport aircraft have flown at least six times to Israel to then return with additional
Israeli suicide drones on board. These Harop drones have been widely used in attacks on
Armenian positions. An Israeli made LORA short range ballistic missile was used by Azerbaijan
to
attack a bridge that connects Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia. Allegedly there are also
Turkish flown F-16 fighter planes in Azerbaijan.
Turkey seems to direct the drones and fighter planes in Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh
through AWACS type air control planes that fly circles at the Turkish-Armenian border.
The attack plan Azerbaijan had in mind when it launched the war foresaw to take several
miles deep zones per day. It has not survived the first day of battle. Azerbaijan started the
attack without significant artillery preparation. The ground attack was only supported by drone
strikes on Armenian tanks, artillery and air defense positions. But the defensive lines held by
Armenian infantry were not damaged by the drones. The dug in Armenian infantry could use its
anti-tank and anti-infantry weapons to full extend. Azerbaijani tanks and infantry were
slaughtered when they tried to break into the lines. Both sides had significant casualties but
overall the frontlines did not move.
The war seems already to be at a stalemate. Neither Armenia nor Azerbaijan can afford to use
air power and ballistic missiles purchased from Russia without Russian consent.
The drone attacks were for a while quite successful. A number of old air defense systems
were
destroyed before the Armenians became wiser with camouflaging them. The Azerbaijani's than
used a trick to unveil hidden air defense positions. Radio controlled Antonov
AN-2 airplanes, propeller driven relicts from the late 1940s, were sent over Armenian
positions. When the air defense then launched a missile against them a loitering suicide drone
was immediately dropped onto the firing position .
That seems to have worked for a day or two but by now such drone attacks have been become
rare. Dozens of drones were shut down before they could hit a target and Azerbaijan seems to be
running out of them. A bizarre music video the
Azerbaijanis posted showed four trucks each
carrying nine drones. It may have had several hundreds of those drones but likely less than one
thousand. Israel is currently under a strict pandemic lockdown. Resupply of drones will be an
issue. Azerbaijan has since brought up more heavy artillery but it seems to primarily use it to
hit towns and cities, not the front lines where it would be more useful.
It is not clear who is commanding the Azerbaijani troops. There days ago the Chief of the
General Staff of Azerbaijan was fired after he
complained about too much Turkish influence on the war. That has not helped. Two larger ground
attacks launched by Azerbaijan earlier today were also unsuccessful. The Armenians are
currently counter attacking.
In our last piece on the war we pointed
to U.S. plans to 'overextend Russia' by creating trouble in the Caucasus just as it is now
happening. Fort Russnotes
:
The current director of the CIA, Gina Haspel , was doing field assignments in Turkey in
the early stages of her career, she reportedly speaks Turkish, and she has history of
serving as a
station chief in Baku, Azerbaijan , in the late 1990s. It is, therefore, presumable that
she still has connections with the local government and business elites.
The current Chief of the MI6, Richard Moore , also has history of working in Turkey -- he
was performing tasks for the British intelligence there in the late 1980s and the early
1990s. Moore is fluent in Turkish and he also
served as the British Ambassador to Turkey from 2014 to 2017.
The intelligence chiefs of the two most powerful countries in the Anglosphere are
turkologists with connections in Turkey and Azerbaijan. It would be reasonable to assume that
a regional conflict of such magnitude happening now, on their watch, is far from being a mere
coincidence.
Before President Trump stopped the program the CIA had used the Azerbaijani Silk Way
Airlines in more than 350
flights to bring weapons from Bulgaria to Turkey to then hand them to 'Syrian rebels'.
Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, is not only a CIA station but also a Mossad center for waging
its silent war against Iran.
I have never perceived it that way. While Armenia's current Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan
tried to get into business with 'western' powers and NATO there was no way he could
fundamentally change Armenia's foreign policy. A hundred years ago Turkey, with the second
biggest NATO army, had genocided Armenians. They have never forgotten that. The relation to
Azerbaijan were also certain to continue to be hostile. That will only change if the two
countries again come under some larger empire. Armenia depends on Russian arms support just as
much as Azerbaijan does. (Azerbaijan has more money and pays more for its Russian weapons which
allows Russia to subsidize the ones it sells to Armenia.)
After Nikol Pashinyan was installed and tried to turn 'west' Russia did the same as it did
in Belarus when President Lukashenko started to make deals with the 'west'. It set back and
waited until the 'west' betrayed its new partners. That has happened in Belarus a few weeks
ago. The U.S. launched a color revolution against Lukashenko and he had nowhere to turn to
but to Russia . Now Armenia is under attack by NATO supported forces and can not hope for
help from anywhere but Russia.
Iran likewise did not fear the new government in Yerevan. It was concerned over Pashinyan's
recent diplomatic exchanges with Israel which were at the initiative of the White House. But
that concern has now been lifted. To protest against Israel's recent sale of weapon to
Azerbaijan Armenia has called back its
ambassador from Israel just two weeks after it opened its embassy there.
Pashinyan will have to apologize in Moscow before Russia will come to his help. As Maxim
Suchkov relays :
This is interesting: Evgeniy "Putin's chef" Prigozhin gives short interview to state his
"personal opinion" on Nagorno-Karabakh. Some takeaways:
- Karabakh is Azerbaijan's territory
- Russia has no legal grounds to conduct military activity in Karabakh
- there are more American NGOs in Armenia than national military units
- PM Pashinyan is to blame
- until 2018 Russia was able to ensure ARM & AZ discuss conflict at the negotiation
table, then US brought Pashinyan to power in Yerevan and he feels he's a king & can't
talk to Aliyev
I wonder if Prigozhin's remarks suggest he'd be reluctant to deploy his Wagner guys to
Armenia, if needed or if he is asked to do so, or he's just indeed stating his own views or
it's a way to delicately allude to Pashinyan that Moscow not happy with him ... ?
Russia's (and Iran's) interest is to refreeze the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. But that
requires compliant people on both sides. It therefore does not mind that Azerbaijan currently
creates some pressure on Pashinyan. But it can not allow Azerbaijan to make a significant
victory. One of its main concern will be to get Turkey out of the game and that will require
support for Armenia. Iran has a quite similar strategy.
The U.S. will probably try to escalate the situation and to make it more complicate for Russia.
It is likely silently telling Turkey to increase its involvement in the war.
Russia will likely only intervene if either side makes some significant territorial gains.
Unless that happens it will likely allow the war to continue in the hope that
it will burn out :
The upcoming winter conditions, coupled with the harsh terrain, will limit large-scale
military operations. Also, the crippled economies of both Azerbaijan and Armenia will not
allow them to maintain a prolonged conventional military confrontation.
Posted by b on October 3, 2020 at 17:28 UTC |
Permalink
thanks b....informative... another proxy war is how this looks to me with all the usual
suspects involved... they couldn't get what they wanted in syria, so now onto this...
The war started the day after negotiations between Russia and Turkey over Syria and maybe
Libya also failed. Now the Azeri military complains about too much Turkish involvement which
can only mean one thing--complaining about taking orders from Turks. So this looks like a
Turkish aggression against Moscow? Meant to make a point about Syria? Libya?
In fact, most of your links are propaganda from both sides. We really have no idea what is
going on on the ground.
In fact, most of your links are propaganda from both sides. We really have no idea what is
going on on the ground.
Azerbaijan's position is justified, given that Armenia illegally occupies Azeri territory.
The failure here is on the OSCE group for not being able or willing to resolve the conflict.
Azerbaijan has a right to regain its territory by force, if necessary.
Russia may very well allow Azerbaijan to retake its territory, if it can, but draw a red
line as to entering Armenia proper. The Current Armenian government is hardly a friend of
Russia.
@ Blue Dotterel | Oct 3 2020 18:17 utc | 4... do you feel the same way about crimea and
ukraine taking it back? curious... you live in turkey if i am not mistaken.. are you
turkish??
In a rare move, the Defense Ministry suspended the export license of an Israeli drone
manufacturer to Azerbaijan in light of claims that the company attempted to bomb the Armenian
military on the Azeris behalf during a demonstration of one of its "suicide" unmanned aerial
vehicles last month.
The two Israelis operating the two Orbiter 1K drones during the test refused to carry out the
attack, Two higher ranking members of the Aeronautics Defense Systems delegation in Baku
then attempted to carry out the Azerbaijani request , but, lacking the necessary
experience, ended up missing their targets.
Last year, Azerbaijan used another Israeli suicide drone, an Israeli Aerospace Industries
Harop-model, in an attack on a bus that killed seven Armenians.
Last year, the country's president, Ilham Aliyev, revealed Azerbaijan had purchased some $5
billion worth of weapons and defense systems from Israel.
My citizenship is the same as yours. No one recognizes Nagorno Karabagh independence, not
even Armenia.
Bulent Ecevit, two time PM of Turkey, leftist and a poet, suggested the logical solution
to the problem years ago. He suggested that Armenia cede land along the Armenian/Iran border
of similar size so that Azerbaijan could unite with its southern territory Nakhchivan, thus
Nagorno Karabagh could be exchanged for this territory. Both sides would be winners one
assumes.
Apparently, no one liked the idea despite its fairness. I assume the Azeris in NK would
have to be exchanged with the Armenians in the corridor in a population exchange for this to
be realized.
"The war started the day after negotiations between Russia and Turkey over Syria and maybe
Libya also failed"
More than a week before start of the war, everyone involved in the region politics knew the
war is imminent. Two days before the start of war Zarif rushed to Moscow.
This bastard of Prigozhin goes where the money flows.
And the money flows from Baku.
Do not give much credit to this thug.
Or perhaps Crimea belongs to Ukraine?
"Bulent Ecevit, two time PM of Turkey, leftist and a poet, suggested the logical
solution to the problem years ago. He suggested that Armenia cede land along the
Armenian/Iran border of similar size so that Azerbaijan could unite with its southern
territory Nakhchivan, thus Nagorno Karabagh could be exchanged for this territory. Both sides
would be winners one assumes.
Apparently, no one liked the idea despite its fairness. I assume the Azeris in NK would
have to be exchanged with the Armenians in the corridor in a population exchange for this to
be realized."
That reads like a reasonable solution. Too bad it wasn't embraced.
b "The highlands of Nagorno-Karabakh are ethnically Armenian."? Nagorno Kharbakh is
internationally recognized Azerbaijan territory
Pashinyan's placement in Armenia was meant to give an advantage to those that 'brung him'
Your claims to the otherwise are some kind of pretzel logic.
Georgia absolutely flat out denied any passage of 'rebels' through their territory. That
claim is utter unsubstantiated rubbish.
"have never perceived it that way. While Armenia's current Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan
tried to get into business with 'western' powers and NATO there was no way he could
fundamentally change Armenia's foreign policy"
Why because you say he couldn't? The one constant is change.
While it is not a solution as such, I fully agree with b's last point about Russia and Iran
preferring to 'refreeze' the game and remove Turkey from the board.
Since the kick off I have wondered to what extent this is an Azerbaijani initiative and to
what extent a Turkish one.
Either way, as I posted on the open thread, Lavrov and Cavusoglu agreed a couple of days
ago that a ceasefire was necessary and Russia reiterated its strong stance against the
presence of foreign militias in the conflict. Let's hope sober heads prevail. As Rouhani
stated very clearly, the region can not withstand another war.
Sorry, didn't really answer your question. Kosovo, N. Cyprus, Crimea (annexation) and NK
independence are all regarded as illegal accoding to international law, as far as, I know.
None have had a proper UN sponsored referendum.
Although Turkish N. Cyprus did vote to reunite with Greek S. Cyrprus in a UN referendum, but
the Greek Cypriots nixed it, and were immediately admitted to the EU as a prize for their
pigheadedness.
Is it any wonder that Turks don't trust the Christian West or East? Neither the Grek
Cypriots or the Armenians have any incentive nor desire to negotiate in good faith because
the US, Europe and Russia are unwilling to compel them to, but reward them instead with
territorial freezes that benefit them.
The ethnic Muslim Turks in both cases get screwed because of the racist propaganda
directed at them through the ages.
Wow, Blue Dotterel, the hatred for Armenians runs deep in you. Nakhichevan was handed over to
Azerbaijan by the Soviets even before Karabakh/Artsakh was. Then the ethnic cleansing of its
majority Armenian population and destruction of ancient Armenian monuments began so there
would be little trace of its pedigree. Armenia has been chipped away at and betrayed by their
so-called betters generation upon generation. They are not budging nor should they.
You can buy as many weapons as you want, if your soldiers don't know how to fight it's not
going to help. Whether you get 4000 Syrian rebels or 40,000 to Azerbaijan it still won't help
them. If Azerbaijan could take those lands they wound have done it without asking Russia's
permission. Even with advanced weapons they stand no chance. Armenians are using mostly
antiquated and cheap air defense tech to shoot down the most advanced and expensive drones in
the world. Thousands of their troops got slaughtered And hundreds of tanks destroyed so they
could get one village that no one needs ? Wow great results. If they continue with these
results for 2 more weeks they are going to need a brand new army. One thing Azeris have
difficulty understanding is that in real life Might makes Right. Armenians learned this
lesson back in 1914 when they got slaughtered and no one cared, not even the Christian west
or orthodox Russia. Azeris just need to learn to leave with defeat and shame. And Azeris
don't understand how bizarre and funny their army music videos look outside Azerbaijan. Same
thing with Armenian videos. Not sure why both sides think there is a need to glorify war
which creates grief and misery.
What makes you think I hate Armenians? I grew up with many Armenian friends and
acquaintences in my home country. Even in Turkey, I have worked with Armenians (Turkish
citizens, of course) and even had and Armenian (from Armenia) cleaning women for my flat.
I certainly do think Armenians have had poor to incompetent, even racist leaders. Sort of
like the US recently. Indeed, both countries have even had a similar Covid19
mismanagement.
No, I have no problem with Armenians, any more than I do with USAians or any other
peoples.
You state "the ethnic cleansing of its majority Armenian population" with out any context,
but you do realise that Armenians are quite capable of and certainly committted ethnic
cleansing themselves. From the Pepe Escobar article: https://thesaker.is/whats-at-stake-in-the-armenia-azerbaijan-chessboard/
"The peace talks are going nowhere because Armenia is refusing to budge (to withdraw from
occupying Nagorno-Karabakh plus 7 surrounding regions in phases or all at once, with the
usual guarantees for civilians, even settlers – note that when they went in in the
early 1990s they cleansed those lands of literally all Azerbaijanis, something like between
700,000 and 1 million people)."
So, fact, the Armenians ethnically cleansed some 700,000 to 1 million Azeris from the
Azeri lands they now occupy including NK.
Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity. Unfortunately, is commonplace in war time,
and even in peace time.
To make countries eligible to become part of the NATO the west first they would need to be
cleansed going through a western inspired and planed color revolution. Russian resistance
formula to prevent these countries joining NATO is to make these countries an economic,
political and military basket case by making parts of these countries' territory contested,
and out of control of western recognized seating governments. Once countries territorial
integrity becomes challenged and out of control of western inspired governments, it becomes a
challenge to be absorbed by any for any alliances. Such a country is a failed country
dependent on western economic, political and military freebies. Likes of Ukraine, Georgia,
Azerbaijan etc. We shall see when, US/west feel, this will not work and will go nowhere, and
tries to climb down the unipolar peak. Both of these countries are dependent on Iran and
Russia.
Self-determination is considered a major principle of international law. This principle is
included in the UN's Charter (Chapter 1). Even if a group of people goes ahead with declaring
its independence and breaking away from a country it dislikes being part of, as in the case
of Crimea, without consulting with the UN in any way, the UN cannot object to this act. What
Crimea did, did not violate international law.
Had the Crimeans consulted with the UN, they very likely would have been advised to remain
part of Ukraine.
Self-determination does not require any support or sponsorship from the UN.
Good analysis by MOA, and I also hope the war burns out going nowhere.
As to those that say NK is Azeri territory: after the Armenians were genocided on the
street of Baku in the 1990's and Azeri's destroyed 5,000 Armenian monumemts would you just
'walk away' and not protect the people of NK? And after getting out followed by the Azeri's
butchering the Armenians of NG it will be ignored!
Why did the Turks bring all those jihadis to Azerbaijan to fight: they will run the
massacres in NK.
I am not disagreeing with the Crimean's decision, and indeed sympathize with it, but still
question whether it shouldn't be considered illegal. I mean, really, how does it differ from
Kosovo separating from Serbia, or the Turkish Cypriots from the Greeks. The UN does not
consider the Turkish Cypriots independent. Perhaps they need to be absorbed by Albania and
Turkey respectively to be considered "legal", just as Russia absorbed Crimea, although it is
not considered legal, either. So why hasn't Armenia annexed NK? Why hasn't the UN recognized
NK as a separate state?
Anyway, we are not discussing our preferences here. The Greek Cypriots rejected uniting
their country with the Turks under a UN referendum, but the Turks voted for a united country.
Why are the Turkish Cypriots not recognized as a country by the UN or anyone, but Turkey. Why
have they not been rewarded with EU membership as the Greeks were? Is it any surprise that
the Greeks won't negotiate in good faith with the Turks? Why should they? They get the
benefits. the Turks not.
As I noted in the last thread on this topic: the war serves to make the Azeris more dependent
on the West. 'Winning' the war is perhaps not the goal of those behind the conflict.
Posted by: AriusArmenian | Oct 3 2020 20:33 utc | 25
So far the jihadis are hearsay, not fact nay more than the PKK are fact fighting with the
Armenians. It would not be surprizing in either case, but neither has been confirmed as fact,
but merely propaganda.
Again, it is not surprising that some people in the "Christian world attribute all the
massacres and destructions on the Muslims but ignor the massacres and ethnic cleansing
committed by the "Christian" side. This is is a tacit, perhaps subconscious racism that has
existed for hundreds of years. It is so difficult to be objective when you have been brought
up to dislike, perhaps even hate the other, isn't it?
@ Blue Dotterel ... thanks for your comments... you never said, but i take it you are of
turkish descent.. either way, i like the comments you make, even if i don't know enough to
agree or disagree with them.. there are usually 2 sides to every story, but we often don't
hear both sides stories..
"The Greek Cypriots rejected uniting their country"
As I understand it the war in Cyprus started when Greek Cypriots abolished the rules
stipulated by British colonizers meant to subjugate majority Greek population. Those rules
gave Turk Cypriots larger portion of the power then the Greek.
Voting for unification expecting to come back to the same discriminatory laws against Greek
Cypriots is non-option for the Greek Cypriots.
The other thing regarding proposition to Armenians to trade its own historical land for the
other part of its own land and call if fair is very biased by my opinion. It is almost the
same as proposition to Serbia to trade part of its land with current Serbian majority in the
Nato occupied part of the country (Kosovo and Metohia) for the other part of the Serbia
proper where some of the land has Albanian majority.
Proposal to trade a corridor to the Azerbaijans Nakhchivan for the corridor to Armenians
Nagorno Karabagh would be a fair proposal.
So in both cases/proposals (Cyprus and Armenia) on the surface seem fair but if someone
scratch the surface the situation appear to be far from the fair.
And in the both cases the presentation is biased for the Turkish side ... by accident.
Stupid people fighting stupid wars for stupid reasons. The peoples of the Caucasus need to
learn to live in peace with each other or the region will continue to be a backwater
exploited for great power geopolitical games.
Russia and Iran are correct to stay out of this and let the idiots kill each other. If
there was any significant security threat from the mob of unruly idiots running Georgia,
Azerbaijan and Armenia; the Russian and Iranians would roll over them all in 48 hours and
there is not a damn thing anyone outside the Caucasus could do about it.
Agreed, sorry Mr B, no malice intended, but your blog's credibility with unfamiliar
audiences could potentially be undermined with some occasionally 'liberal' use of the English
language.
Respect for using your foreign language skills of course, but perhaps a friendly proof
reader with native English skills could also be an idea..
No, I am of mixed European descent, both east and west. And yes, that is the problem; we
seldom do seek out both sides. When one looks at the Assange case, one sees the the problem
of our age (and many others) where the prosecution is allowed to present its case with all
prejudice, but the defense is repeatedly hampered by the supposedly impartial judge. And the
media, well what to the people get - propaganda, often through ommision in this case.
Similarly, peoples are judged by through the propaganda of a culture or society, usually
to benefit those with power. So people are taught to demonize or denigrate the other assuming
their own to have upstanding moral character or, if defeated in some way, victims needing
redress.
After the bombing of the Turkish consulate in Ottawa in the early 80s by an Armenian
terrorist group, ASALA, I made a point of educating myself on the so called genocide issue,
but had a hard time finding the Turkish point of view in Canada. As fortune would have it, I
found employment in Turkey, and eventually discovered what was difficult to find in Canada:
an alternative point of view concerning the issue and many others. Examining the writers'
treatment of facts and their academic backgrounds was certainly educational in many
cases.
Suffice it to say that on being able to actually see the "defense", I came to different
judgements from those I would be able to come to in my home country.
@ Blue Dotterel | Oct 3 2020 21:23 utc | 36.. thank you for this as well.. i hear what you
are saying.. it is an ongoing battle to get all the information and nuances.. we probably
don't ever get all the information necessary which is why i resort to believing war is not
the answer.. easy for me to say this here on the westcoast of canada...
Ah yes, the "other side's" point of view about Armenian genocide. Did you look for the Nazis'
point of view about the Shoah, too?
Point is, Turkey has been genociding (directly or by proxies) non-Muslim people since the
late 19th century, and keeps trying to do it everywhere it can. In a way, Kurds are lucky to
be Muslim, they're just occupied and suppressed instead of being mass-murdered by the
millions - unlike Cypriots, Greeks, Armenians, Yazidis, Assyrians and others.
The seven surrounding regions should be returned to Azerbaijan, so that 600,000 refugees can
return to their homes. NKAO should be allowed to join Armenia to avoid creating new refugees.
I understand that legally NKAO is part of Azerbaijan, but Armenians have been living in
Artsakh for thousands of years, and it is unrealistic to expect them to give up and leave. On
the other hand, it is morally wrong to preserve the status quo and thus accept the ethnic
cleansing of the 90s. That's why a compromise is needed.
Posted by: Blue Dotterel | Oct 3 2020 19:55 utc | 22
Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity. Unfortunately, is commonplace in war time,
and even in peace time.
Yeah, when was that when Bulgarians expelled Turks from Bulgaria, 1989? It was tragic, hard
to watch.
Nationalism is evil. I blame French for that disease.
Somewhat unrelated question: so Karabakh is written in Turkish Karabağ, which is
quite similar (to me) to Montenegro, Karadağ. Is the similarity accidental, or both
words have related meaning / connotation?
Posted by: Blue Dotterel | Oct 3 2020 20:54 utc | 29
So far the jihadis are hearsay, not fact nay more than the PKK are fact fighting with the
Armenians. It would not be surprizing in either case, but neither has been confirmed as
fact, but merely propaganda.
Bulent Ecevit, two time PM of Turkey, leftist and a poet, suggested the logical solution to
the problem years ago. He suggested that Armenia cede land along the Armenian/Iran border
of similar size so that Azerbaijan could unite with its southern territory Nakhchivan, thus
Nagorno Karabagh could be exchanged for this territory. Both sides would be winners one
assumes.
I would not be one who so assumes. Armenia would be nuts to give up their border
with the one neighbor supportive of them while creating contiguity between Turkey and
Azerbaijan's main territory.
One of my all-time favorite recordings is Love, Devotion, Surrender
(Santana, McLaughlin). The very first piece on the album, a cover of Coltrane's "A Love
Supreme," has the two guitarists engage in a master-acolyte argument that frantically
escalates, culminating in a crescendo of...agreement?
Yeah, those Syrian "rebels" that Turkey shipped to Azerbaijan are more than hearsay and
rumor. My heart really bleeds for them that when they got there they found they were facing a
well-equipped and trained army, rather than having their pick of defenseless Christian
villages where they could bring to bear their skills in robbing, raping, enslaving, and
beheading.
Even without conquering anything, with a large supply of drones and cheap yet robust comms
(I feel the need to think of point to point IR, but I don't know enough about modern radio),
the attacker can do a lot of damage without losing anything that expensive, i.e. potentially
cheap spotter and relay drones, plus the munitions themselves. Air defense technology made to
counter turn-of-the-century jets/helis/cruise-missiles, is not really appropriate. Handing
out manpads in quantity creates other problems.
This is what I come to MoA for. And it's nice to see b disclose his authorship with his
trademark idiomatic slips ("full extend" for "to their full extent", 'unveil' for 'reveal'
and 'relicts' for 'relics', etc).
"Full extend" was a slight error, but "unveil" seems perfectly fine to me, and "relicts"
was a better choice than "relics" in that context. (Though really the Antonov An-2 isn't
either a relic or relict "from the late 1940s": they were produced in vast numbers for
decades.)
@ Dr Wellington 46: Also 'Visions of the Emerald Beyond' by The Mahavishnu Orchestra is a
fantastic album that I think captures the Fusion era with a sense of refinement and less of
the "slop".
Extend should be extent, I like discover better there than reveal or unveil, and relic has
religious connotations, relict implies "remnant" which might work, derelict suggests
inoperable, hmmm.
Maybe "remnant" or "survivor" would work.
But to be honest B's usage didn't bother me reading over it, the Internets is nothing if
not slovenly about grammar and usage.
Some people here speak of yet more "exchanges" of territory as if it wouldn't involve 100%
replacement of the people living there. and almost certainly by murder. They seem to think
ethnic cleansing can be undone by more ethnic cleansing or at the very least loudly support
one more round of it as a "final solution". They make it easy to understand why Erdogan
references Hitler in positive terms.
The suggestion that Armenia and Artsakh losing their borders to Iran is fair is silly and
anything but fair. It is an invitation to more war and genocide after such a "peace deal".
The "peace plan" is nothing but siege warfare, it is a barely disguised war plan targeting
Armenia and Artsakh.
North Cyprus being presented as some kind of Turkish benevolence belies the fact of the
current ethnic Turkic dominance of the demographics of North Cyprus which did not happen by
natural means, ie. it was/is over forty years of steadfast ethnic cleansing. Almost none of
them were Cypriot when the Turkish invasion happened no matter how much they lie and pretend
they were.
@hopehely how conveniently you forget that Bulgaria was under the Ottoman rule for 500 years
and plenty of Bulgarian got murdered by the Turks during that time. WHEN the Bulgarians
rebelled against the Turks in 1875–78, the Europeans didn't wept for ALL the Bulgarian
women, children and men that were savagely slaughtered by the Turks, but instead sent one guy
who claimed he never saw any atrociousness.
YEah, most of modern peoples' memory goes as far back as WII, everything else is forgotten.
FUCK YOU, the Turks have always been savages.
Before President Trump stopped the program the CIA had used the Azerbaijani Silk Way Airlines
in more than 350 flights to bring weapons from Bulgaria to Turkey to then hand them to
'Syrian rebels'. Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, is not only a CIA station but also a Mossad
center for waging its silent war against Iran.
This is dubious. Why use an Azeri airline to ferry weapons over the border that separates
Bulgaria from Turkey, with a choice of three highways, an electrified railroad, or even by a
ship (164 nautical miles between the main ports of the two countries).
If Blitzkrieg failed the Azeris will use the attrition war tactic and that is absolutely
certain to succeed. Murad Gazdiev tweeted selfies posted by Jihadi imports in Azeri uniforms
in Azerbaijan here: https://mobile.twitter.com/MuradGazdiev/status/1312372865937932289
Jihadis will therefore be used as canon fodder by Azerbaijan while the Ottomans take over the
air combat, directly or indirectly. Unless Azerbaijan is stupid enough to attack Armenia
directly there is nothing Russia will ever do about it.
At some point approaching rapidly Armenian frontline positions will collapse and then
there will be a panicked refugee flood into Armenia from Nagorno Karabakh and the surrounding
occupied Azeri areas. At that point Nagorno Karabakh will become impossible to defend.
Whether Azerbaijan permits Erdogan to seed the area with jihadis is an open question, but at
the least Erdo will place Ottoman troops there to "guard against Armenia".
Without Nagorno Karabakh Armenia is actually worth very little to Russia. Even if it could
be "taught a lesson" by Putinist restraint it would be strategically useless and a resource
hole. A NATO Armenia, with or without a NATO Azerbaijan, would be a strategic disaster but
that's the way things seem headed.
Watching the latest South Front videos it is easy to see how drone technology makes it
difficult to move vehicles and set up fixed positions. It looks like a very high technology
affair to counter drones.
Very expensive very costly training would equate to excellent results in second and third
world areas for combat drones. Again the war party wins. It would be cheaper to build stable
societies. What a toxic mess. It must be some weird parallel groups of death cults pushing
this continued chaos.
Maybe is is just plain old human nature with high tech advantages over bronze and iron
weapons. Even the bronze age brought a long period of peace and prosperity for a time.
If Blitzkrieg failed the Azeris will use the attrition war tactic and that is absolutely
certain to succeed. Murad Gazdiev tweeted selfies posted by Jihadi imports in Azeri uniforms
...
Posted by: Biswapriya Purkayast | Oct 4 2020 2:18 utc | 58
I beg to differ. This is not Libya, both sides have relatively large armies, Armenians
have weapons, high ground, prepared positions and people who believe that the choice is
between standing the ground and exile (or worse). They will not be demoralized by few hundred
casualties. Azerbaijan has low ground, attack uphill is not easy, and the motivation of
soldiers is not as good. After bringing few hundred or even few thousands of second rate
jihadists the equation will not change (inequality if you will).
Of course, if the war is protracted, both sides will need supplies. Except for Turkey, no
one declared the will to supply either side, but unofficial traffic is bound to happen.
Russia and Iran will surely neutralize any supplies from Turkey and Israel, they need to
maintain the regional balance that so far is in their favor.
Then there is no potential for tipping the balance by direct intervention: it will trigger
direct Russian response. Concerning the coming winter, one should read Wikipedia "Battle of
Sarikamish". On New Year Eve of 1915, Turkish army advised by Germans attacked Russian
positions after crossing high mountains. Because of even bloodier fighting in France, Russia
was attacking in East Prussia to relieve the French and Caucasus Army was at half of full
strength. The result was that 1/3 of Russian troops were lost, a lot of them to frostbite,
and about the Turks there are debates: did 1/10 of them survive, a bit less, or a bit
more.
"... As soon as many generals retire, they become the high-paid consultants and lobbyists for the major weapons manufacturers. There was a time when the Boston Globe and papers wrote about it. I wonder how many will now. It is time to recognize the problem and face up to the destructive influence it is having on our nation and our families in both our foreign and domestic policies. ..."
"... This is another consequence of allowing the people who own the media to own other things. Allowing the people who make bullets and bombs to own media is a sure recipe for perpetual war. ..."
"... It is quite normal for a top General to protect his cabal of corruption. He still has his slush fund money to protect. These military "Heroes" are in the habit of sending men to their deaths, just to advance themselves into top jobs with the Military Industrial Complex. ..."
"... They retire into prime Lobbying positions as well. This corruption has produced more broken Veterans than Covid-19 has produced deaths. ..."
"... “ I can assure the American people that the senior leaders would only recommend sending our troops to combat when it is required in national security and in the last resort, ” As invading Syria, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Grenada, Cambodia, Laos.... and many other countries was a last resort to secure the US national security. ..."
"... Trump says those things, and at the same time increases the Pentagon's budget & spending to over $1 Trillion (more than the next 15 Countries combined, and 13 of them are your allies).. ..."
"... Trump is picking up some that vote that supported Tulsi Gabbard, or so I speculate. Though he speaks with a bit of forked tongue -- stealing oil in Syria, won't pull out of Iraq when told by Iraqi government; still in Afghanistan long after the Pentagon lost the war there again another war lost against a fourth world country. ..."
"... An interviewer should test this man's integrity with a simple question, such as.. "When you retire, will promise to live off your generous pension....like Eisenhower in his rocking chair....and not go to work for an arms manufacturer or think tank or any other paid position?" ..."
"... Trump should spin the rest of the beans. Directly and indirectly, the Violence Industry is the biggest employer in the US. It's a gigantic social program. ..."
"... I think Trump is posturing for re election purposes . He is clearly in the hands of the deep state. ..."
"... Trump promised to end America’s “endless wars” . Just look at the people he appointed. They all love war. and trying to expand them. Russia showed the world, convoys of stolen Syrian oil. Than Russia bombed them. Now the US is stealing even more Syrian oil and nobody is bombing it. ..."
"... Biden was thinking about rebuilding contracts for his family and friends before the first bombs ever fell General.. ..."
Army Chief of Staff General James McConville has vehemently rejected Donald Trump's comments
alleging that the military's top commanders wish to entangle the US in as many wars as possible
in order to enrich weapon manufacturers.
" I can assure the American people that the senior leaders would only recommend sending
our troops to combat when it is required in national security and in the last resort, "
McConville, a Trump appointee, said during an online conference on Tuesday. " We take this
very, very seriously in how we make our recommendations. "
The general added that many of the US commanders have sons and daughters that currently
serve in the military and some of them " may be in combat right now. " The general
declined to more directly respond to Trump's allegations, saying the military should remain out
of politics.
The Chief of Staff was referring to the highly publicized comments Trump made on Monday. The
president said that " the top people in the Pentagon " might not be " in love "
with him " because they want to do nothing but fight wars " to provide business for the
US military-industrial complex.
During his 2016 campaign, Trump promised to end America's " endless wars " as he
often calls them. However, the long-time military bureaucrats he appointed to command publicly
opposed Trump's propositions to reduce US military presence in Afghanistan and Syria.
Please. Who is he kidding. Rather than recognize the problem like an Al-Anon, he discredits
himself and his institution even by suggesting there isn't one. As soon as many generals
retire, they become the high-paid consultants and lobbyists for the major weapons
manufacturers. There was a time when the Boston Globe and papers wrote about it. I wonder how
many will now. It is time to recognize the problem and face up to the destructive influence
it is having on our nation and our families in both our foreign and domestic policies.
This is another consequence of allowing the people who own the media to own other things.
Allowing the people who make bullets and bombs to own media is a sure recipe for perpetual
war.
The media needs to be splintered into a thousand pieces with the new owners not allowed
to own anything else. The Sherman anti trust act used to spell this out in law.
LonDubh 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 07:04 PM
It is quite normal for a top General to protect his cabal of corruption. He still has his
slush fund money to protect. These military "Heroes" are in the habit of sending men to their
deaths, just to advance themselves into top jobs with the Military Industrial Complex.
They
retire into prime Lobbying positions as well. This corruption has produced more broken
Veterans than Covid-19 has produced deaths. VFW (Victims of Futile Wars) have seen their
ranks increase and their support mechanism decreased. Another generation of American youth
destined for the scrapheap of "Heros"
IgyBundy LonDubh 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 04:25 AM
Have you noticed what great liars these so called honorable military brass have become?
Better than most politicians..
“ I can assure the American people that the senior leaders would only recommend
sending our troops to combat when it is required in national security and in the last
resort, ” As invading Syria, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Grenada, Cambodia, Laos.... and
many other countries was a last resort to secure the US national security.
Everyone knows that there is collusion between some serving and ex top guns with the MIC.
Resulting in endless wars everywhere and many countries are forced by security tension to buy
more expensive weapons which they can ill afford
It is not the generals but the politicians that started the endless wars. The politicians get
campaign donations to their Super PACs or to an offshore numbered bank account.
Jewel Gyn 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 09:07 PM
What national security threat and last resort when all wars conducted are in foreign soils.
Even if there are threats on the hundreds of military bases deployed around the world, the
question is still 'what the *f are US troops there in the first place'.
Mark La Brooy 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 09:59 PM
Is it any surprise that the US spends $700 billion on defense. Next comes China with only $90
billion or thereabouts. Yes, Trump is right. It is all about the US military industry complex
and continuous war.
Apparently it's been the last resort continually since 1775.
Sinalco 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 07:05 PM
Trump says those things, and at the same time increases the Pentagon's budget & spending
to over $1 Trillion (more than the next 15 Countries combined, and 13 of them are your
allies).. As they say, action speaks louder than words - those are just cheap empty words to
rally his base for the coming election.
Trump not as much of a war monger as the establishment would like. Most Americans oppose war
but that has never slowed the establishment. Probably the biggest reason the establishment
is so opposed to Trump, among the other obvious reasons.
Are you a kindergartener or just plainly naive?!!! Trump knows Americans love to hear this,
so he is giving you the LIP SERVICE FCOL !!! He will pamper the MIC just as he has been doing
in the last 4 years once the election in November is over! Exactly because americans are so
incredibly foolish that Trump or Biden will be your next president, LOL!
donkeyoatee 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 01:52 AM
How was Vietnam or Iraq anything to do with US "national security" or the wars in Yemen or
anywhere in the middle east and around the globe. The US isn't doing "National security" it's
doing interference and domination.
Ekaterina 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 08:00 PM
I would laugh if this whole situation wasn’t so pitiful and sad. Eisenhower was right.
Shelbouy 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 10:34 AM
So many people say that Trump has not started any wars, which makes him ok. He didn't have
to, there were enough already going on. What he did not do is stop any!
Juan_More 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 07:39 PM
When the Generals and Colonels end up with very cushy jobs in the MIC after they retire. It
certainly does look like something is up. After all who authorised the F35, Ford class
aircraft carriers and my favourite winner of the silly name for a boat the USS Zumwalt
The MIC stooges at the Pentagon don't need to say anything, as Trump's remark reflects what
everybody already knows for decades.
Enki14 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 06:42 PM
LOL The facts speak for themselves and if one considers the endless war(s) since 911 were
based on LIES...the towers were brought down by controlled demolition...in charge that day
was dick cheney.
Trump is picking up some that vote that supported Tulsi Gabbard, or so I speculate. Though he
speaks with a bit of forked tongue -- stealing oil in Syria, won't pull out of Iraq when told
by Iraqi government; still in Afghanistan long after the Pentagon lost the war there again
another war lost against a fourth world country. And he's flirted with an invasion of
Venezuela, perhaps to keep the hawks and neolibs like Bolton and Bill Krystal on the edge of
their seats. Sort of like Merkel getting exercised over Navalny to counter all the blather of
war hawks and those who want to scuttle Nordstream 2. Throwing the ideological dog a bone.
It's satisfying to finally hear a US president pick up the theme Eisenhower warned of. Now
let him tell the truth of the filthy soul of the CIA, to take up where JFK left off. Trump
could do far worse than to thank Pence for his... See more
Jim Christian Rocky_Fjord 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 11:43 PM
Nah, Gabbi is a Democrat. But she's a good kid. She, unlike 99% of them, got a taste of ugly
military service and spoke out, only to be crushed. All you need to know of
military/political corruption is to study THAT.
Karl194 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 07:51 AM
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted
influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for
the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." Dwight Eisenhower (former
USA President)
pykich Karl194 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 08:14 AM
says the man who signed the "Grenada Treaty"...
Jim Christian 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 11:37 PM
How many times has the 'good' general recycled himself between defense contractor jobs and
board positions and then right back into the White House, sometimes to a University posting,
then back to the Pentagon, rinsing and repeating several times after retirement? How do these
Generals and Admirals become multi-millionaires otherwise? And there are hundreds of them.
And they bring us the WORST, most corrupt procurement such as the Ford Class Carriers and the
F-35, to name just TWO examples, albeit big ones Please. It's crooked as a 3-dollar bill.
Look at the Pentagon opposition to Trump's every single overture toward peace in the Middle
East (except Iran, which is a big mistake, our issues were resolved until they weren't under
Trump). Any contest to the premise that the U.S. military is corrupt beyond repair is
patently absurd. And this "General" is just the wrong representative to refute the truth. He
is after all, part of the corruption.
Rocky_Fjord Jim Christian 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 11:46 PM
Two classes of US submarines were made with inferior steel from Australia. The steel was
known by the contractor to be inferior, but the Pentagon did not run its own tests. So tens
of billions wasted for subs that are unsafe at depths and of course in actual combat
conditions. The generals and politicians float above it all like scu*m on a fe*tid pond.
shadowlady 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 09:24 PM
The Pentagon has to justify its enormous budget, they provoke conflict at every turn.
a325 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 09:06 PM
“I can assure the American people that the senior leaders would only recommend sending
our troops to combat when it is required in national security and in the last resort" yada
yada , of course you are going to say that. Admitting the truth would be instant career
suicide
wasn't it Trump and many other presidents who were dishing out money left right and centre to
the american war machine to build bigger and so called better weapons. Goes to show no matter
what when push comes to shove the american government will always blame anyone else but
themselves.
foxenburg 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 01:48 AM
An interviewer should test this man's integrity with a simple question, such as.. "When you
retire, will promise to live off your generous pension....like Eisenhower in his rocking
chair....and not go to work for an arms manufacturer or think tank or any other paid
position?"
Ever since Obama was elected we hear way to much out of these so called Generals. Jumping on
a bandwagon is something active Generals should never do.
lectrodectus 10 September, 2020 10 Sep, 2020 02:06 AM
Frankiln Delanor Roosevelt: (During The Depression Created The WPA Works Progress
Administration) "Instead Of Spending As Some Nations Do Half Their National Income In Piling
Up Armaments And More Armaments For The Purposes Of War, We in America Are Wiser In Using Our
Wealth On Projects Like This Which Will Us More Wealth And Greater Happiness For Our
Children" (Fireside Chats) Similar To Dwight D Eisenhower.
RealWorld1 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 12:26 PM
Trump should spin the rest of the beans. Directly and indirectly, the Violence Industry is
the biggest employer in the US. It's a gigantic social program.
I think Trump is posturing for re election purposes . He is clearly in the hands of the deep
state.
Fred Dozer 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 12:17 AM
Trump promised to end America’s “endless wars” . Just look at the people he
appointed. They all love war. and trying to expand them. Russia showed the world, convoys of
stolen Syrian oil. Than Russia bombed them. Now the US is stealing even more Syrian oil and
nobody is bombing it.
Is Trump really anti-war? Or he is just trying to exert his power over those hawkish generals
in Pentagon to tell the world who is in charge of US? If he is truly against all kinds of
war, that must be the only acceptable thing he has done so far.
The war industry, the prison industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and many others, they all
have their lobbyists and their plans for making more money. And manufacturing more wars, more
prisoners, and more diseases is not beyond them. Freedom and democracy and high cholesterol
are money making cons, and sometimes it takes a con like Trump to recognize it.
PurplePaw 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 02:59 PM
IF TRUMP WANTS TO END WARS ( KILLING) AND RIGHTLY SO THESE SO CALLED GENERALS NEED TO BE
OUSTED FAST. THE MILITARY SHOULD BE IN MY VIEW INCLUDED IN POLITICS AND EXPOSED AS IN ANCIENT
TIMES. A WARRIOR SHOULD BE ABLE TO BECOME CHIEF AS IN THE PAST. A PERSON LIKE ALEXANDER,
JULIUS, BUT THEY MUST ALSO BE THE MOST GALLANT WITH HUMILITY AS IN ARTHUR'S DAYS. NONE OF THE
HIGH MILITARY MEN HIDING BEHIND THE CLOAK IN THE DARK TO DECEIVE WHEN THE TIME IS RIGHT. TO
MUCH OF THAT WHERE THEY ARE. TRUMP IS RIGHT ON HERE, STOP ABORTION.
pykich 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 08:10 AM
They should ask him what his plans after retiring are...
Ph7 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 06:06 AM
If he's so worried about national security "his" troops should be on the streets of US not in
the bushes of Afghanistan and Iraq .
off topic, but very important, Sen. Ben Sasse's op-ed regarding repeal of the 17th amendment.
Haven't seen mention of it at RT. Whether you are red or blue, this is massive in returning
power to the people.
DavidG992 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 06:08 PM
He could stage this 'ati-war' show only becasue democrats have ceded opposition to the
military-industrial war machine to a belligerent fraud.
Absolute truth really bothers these folks a lot. And Trump is not afraid to speak it.
Frank Cannon 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 08:58 PM
They leave the military for high paying indusrty jobs as a form of Briberty / reward for
keeping the endless wrs going & business good..
Mark90168 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 04:24 AM
Every candidate before election become wise due to seeing sword over his heads but after
winning the election they again become hate mongers and wars lovers. The US election
candidates should never be trusted. It reminds me "The game of thrones."
This is easy. Trump has always done exactly as the pentagon wants. this is a stunt for Qanon
votes that's all. Trump is smart he reads. He knows what Qanon thinks and wants to give them
a bone.
General James McConville , even if you tell us that tomorrow the Sun will rise from the East
we will not believe you, until we see it ourselves, general McCorrupt.
Karl194 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 07:55 AM
The DEEP STATE is build by the bosses in the FBI, CIA and the PENTAGON.
Winter7Mute 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 04:41 AM
Violence as a way of gaining power... is being camouflaged under the guise of tradition,
national honor [and] national security. For almost 100yrs now.
Mark90168 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 05:04 AM
Every candidate before election become wise due to seeing sword over his heads but after
winning the election they again become hate mongers and wars lovers. The US election
candidates should never be trusted. It reminds me the game of thrones.
President Trump has gotten rid just about everyone in this article I found 3 years ago
> The ATLANTIC COUNCIL is funded by BURISMA, GEORGE SOROS OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATION &
others. It was a CENTRIST, MILITARISTIC think tanks,now turned leftist group
> JOE BIDEN extorted Ukraine to FIRE the prosecutor investigating BURISMA, HUNTER's
employer.
> LTC VINDMAN & FIONA HILL met MANY TIMES with DANIEL FRIED of the ATLANTIC
COUNCIL. FIONA HILL is a former CoWorker of CHRISTOPHER STEELE !
> AMBASSADOR YOVANOVITCH is connected to the ATLANTIC COUNCIL, is PRAISED in their
documents, gave Ukraine a "do not prosecute" list, was involved in PRESSURING Ukraine to not
prosecute GEORGE SOROS Group.
> BILL TAYLOR has a financial relationship with the ATLANTIC COUNCIL and the US UKRAINE
BUSINESS COUNCIL (USUBC) which is also funded by BURISMA.
> TAYLOR met with THOMAS EAGER (works for ADAM SCHIFF) in Ukraine on trip PAID FOR by
the ATLANTIC COUNCIL. This just days before TAYLOR first texts about the "FAKE" Quid Pro Quo
!
> TAYLOR participated in USUBC Events with DAVID J. KRAMER (JOHN MCCAIN advisor) who
spread the STEELE DOSSIER to the media and OBAMA officials.
> JOE BIDEN is connected to the ATLANTIC COUNCIL, he rolled out his foreign policy
vision while VP there, He has given speeches there, his adviser on Ukraine, MICHAEL CARPENTER
(heads the Penn Biden Center) is a FELLOW at the ATLANTIC COUNCIL.
> KURT VOLKER is now Senior Advisor to the ATLANTIC COUNCIL, he met with burisma
"... Senate hearings in Washington have laid bare the failures of the FBI investigation, showing there was never any evidence of 'collusion', and it was all a campaign to 'get Trump'. ..."
"... Wednesday's hearing focused particularly on court warrants obtained by the FBI under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page, which Committee Chair Lindsey Graham characterized as "a stunning failure of the system." ..."
"... Comey appeared to dodge many of the questions, using a tactic made familiar to the American public during Watergate, responding with a standard "I don't recall." ..."
"... In testimony last week, FBI agent William Barnett, who headed Robert Mueller's investigation into former national security advisor Michael Flynn, revealed that, from his perspective, there was never any evidence to justify an investigation into Flynn's ties to Russia. ..."
"... Barnett claimed that Comey exhibited clear bias in pursuing such alleged ties between Trump and Russia, stating that his superiors in the FBI were simply motivated by a desire to "get Trump." He believed there was nothing there to be found, and the Mueller investigation ultimately did come up with no evidence of collusion between President Trump and Russia. ..."
"... Graham accused the Clinton campaign of "basically trying to create a distraction, accusing Trump of being a Russian agent to distract from her email server problems." ..."
"... Graham pointed out to Comey that a primary document used to attain the FISA warrant "was absolutely full of misinformation and complete lies. Did you know there is no Russian consulate in Miami, and the dossier mentions there was one?" ..."
"... "Do you also know that Michael Cohen's adventures in Prague never happened? The dossier asserts that Michael Cohen went to Prague on some venture for Trump and Russia, and it never happened! And they know it never happened!" ..."
"... "The attorney general went on to say, 'The law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus of this country were involved in advancing a false and utterly baseless Russian collusion narrative against the president.'" ..."
"... US Senator Ben Sasse eventually got Comey to own up. He prefaced his questioning by saying the many wrongs cataloged in the Horowitz Report were "not just saddening and infuriating," but "also really embarrassing." ..."
"... Comey is doing what criminals who are well-educated attorneys do, and that is to avoid saying anything that could be used in his prosecution and claiming to either be unaware of or to not recall key events and proceedings. ..."
"... Looks like it was compartmentalized so much because it was a scam that the ones who actually didn't know what was going on would've blew the whistle. ..."
Senate hearings in Washington have laid bare the failures of the FBI investigation, showing
there was never any evidence of 'collusion', and it was all a campaign to 'get Trump'.
The US Senate Judiciary Committee questioned former FBI Director James Comey during a
hearing this week over the recent Horowitz report. That report on the FBI's Trump-Russia probe
laid out significant omissions in how the FBI handled its investigation.
Wednesday's hearing focused particularly on court warrants obtained by the FBI under the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page, which
Committee Chair Lindsey Graham characterized as "a stunning failure of the
system."
'They were trying to take down the president'
Graham began the proceedings by noting that the goal of the Senate's investigative hearing
"is to understand how our system got off the rails. ... What kind of system is it that the
FBI director has no clue about the most important investigation maybe in the history of the
FBI?"
"When does it become obvious," Graham asked, "that the people in charge had a
deep-seated bias against Trump?" He took that question further by asserting the appearance
of a deep-state soft coup against the president, noting that the omissions in the FBI's process
"weren't random; they were politically oriented against the president they were trying to
take down!"
And, for the record, Graham noted, "The FBI ignored exculpatory evidence, altered
documents from the CIA, had interviews where the sub-source disavowed the accuracy of the
document, and never submitted any of that information to the court!"
Comey appeared to dodge many of the questions, using a tactic made familiar to the American
public during Watergate, responding with a standard "I don't recall." (During the Nixon
Watergate hearings many witnesses prefaced their vague answers with "to the best of my
recollection" to avoid the possibility of later being convicted of perjury. After all, who
can prove the witnesses' memory wasn't clear? They didn't say something didn't happen, just
that, to the best they could remember, it didn't happen.)
Graham began to lose patience with Comey's persistent vaguery and stated at one point,
"Everybody's responsible, but nobody is responsible. Somebody needs to be responsible for
misleading the court . What astounds me the most is that the director of the FBI, in charge of
this investigation and involving a sitting president, is completely clueless about any of the
information obtained by his agency."
Pounding his fist, Graham noted that the information to the courts that Comey had
characterized as merely "inadequate" was "criminally inadequate!""How could the
system ignore all that?" Graham asked, "How could the director of the FBI not know all
of this?"
Recent declassification of FBI documents related to the Mueller report provided Senate
Republicans with new fuel to light under Comey's feet. Graham used the declassified documents
to point out that Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe summarized the 2016
presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton as using "fabrications" , as Graham put it, to
"link Trump to Russia and the mob."
Comey could only respond, "I can't answer that. I've read Mr. Ratcliffe's letter, which I
have trouble understanding."
In testimony last week, FBI agent William Barnett, who headed Robert Mueller's investigation
into former national security advisor Michael Flynn, revealed that, from his perspective, there
was never any evidence to justify an investigation into Flynn's ties to Russia.
Barnett claimed
that Comey exhibited clear bias in pursuing such alleged ties between Trump and Russia, stating
that his superiors in the FBI were simply motivated by a desire to "get Trump." He
believed there was nothing there to be found, and the Mueller investigation ultimately did come
up with no evidence of collusion between President Trump and Russia.
At Wednesday's hearing, Graham summarized the end result of the Mueller investigation,
saying,
"After two-and-a-half years, and $25 million, and 60 FBI agents, that job is done,
and not one person has been charged with colluding with the Russians in the Trump world. Not
one. ... How are we supposed to trust this system without fundamentally changing it?"
Graham accused the Clinton campaign of "basically trying to create a distraction,
accusing Trump of being a Russian agent to distract from her email server problems."
Graham pointed out to Comey that a primary document used to attain the FISA warrant "was
absolutely full of misinformation and complete lies. Did you know there is no Russian consulate
in Miami, and the dossier mentions there was one?"
Graham became more emphatic when asking,
"Do you also know that Michael Cohen's
adventures in Prague never happened? The dossier asserts that Michael Cohen went to Prague on
some venture for Trump and Russia, and it never happened! And they know it never
happened!"
Democrats at the hearing tried to shore up Comey's defense and turn the case against Trump
by claiming he had sided with Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding US intelligence
agencies. They implied that Trump had defamed US intelligence by saying the various agencies'
work was "concerning."
As if to establish this was all demonization of the FBI by the Trump administration,
Democratic Senator Dick Durbin quoted US Attorney General William Barr, the ultimate head of
the FBI, as stating the FBI's Russia investigation was "abhorrent." Durbin noted,
"The attorney general went on to say, 'The law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus of
this country were involved in advancing a false and utterly baseless Russian collusion
narrative against the president.'"
(It was AG William Barr who assigned Horowitz the role of investigating and reporting on the
Mueller investigation.)
To that Comey responded, "He says that a lot. I have no idea what on earth he's talking
about."
Exhibiting some apparent mental fog, Comey said, "The notion that the attorney general
believes that was an illegitimate endeavor to investigate -- that mystifies me."
Even CNN summarizedComey
's testimony on Wednesday as a "mea culpa."
US Senator Ben Sasse eventually got Comey to own up. He prefaced his questioning by saying
the many wrongs cataloged in the Horowitz Report were "not just saddening and
infuriating," but "also really embarrassing."
Comey responded,
"I think I share your reaction, Senator Sasse. The collection of
omissions, failures to consider updates It's embarrassing. It's sloppy. I run out of words.
There's no indication that people were doing bad things on purpose, but that doesn't mean it's
not embarrassing."
Sasse next asked Comey, "Doesn't that point at you? ... You were the leader!" to
which Comey responded, "This reflects on me entirely, and it's my responsibility . I'm not
looking to shirk responsibility."
Sasse further pointed out, "Horowitz's report talks about a FISA [warrant application]
process that was riddled with errors. Every single place they looked, it was crap! ... Where
were you?"
At that point, Comey reverted to diffusing personal responsibility by saying the whole
agency was too relaxed about how the process worked, acknowledging that, as a result, Inspector
General Horowitz had "found problems in every FISA application."
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
David Haggith is an author published by Putnam and HarperCollins. He is publisher of
The Great Recession Blog and writes for over 50 economic news
websites. His Twitter page of economic humor is @EconomicRecess .
Dachaguy 10 hours ago 1 Oct, 2020 10:34 AM
Comey's actions speak to an effort to stage a coup. As Lindsey Graham pointed out at Brett
Kavenaugh's confirmation hearings for a Supreme Court appointment a year or so ago, attempts
to remove a sitting President in a time of war can amount to treason and possible death
sentence by a military court. America has been in a state of war since Sept. 14, 2001, 3 days
after 9-11.
FreedomRain Dachaguy 7 hours ago 1 Oct, 2020 01:15 PM
"It was all a mistake. Actually, it was a joke. Nobody got hurt..." - Comey
Richard Coleman Dachaguy 10 hours ago 1 Oct, 2020 10:41 AM
No, Einstein. A "state of war" exists when Congress in joint session votes a Declaration of
War such as happended after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Odinsson 10 hours ago 1 Oct, 2020 10:40 AM
Jim Comey portrays himself these days to be a cross between Col. Klink and Sgt. Shultz from
Hogan's Heroes - an incompetent leader who knows nothing.
Comey is doing what criminals who
are well-educated attorneys do, and that is to avoid saying anything that could be used in
his prosecution and claiming to either be unaware of or to not recall key events and
proceedings.
By taking this approach Comey makes his guilt readily apparent regardless of the
smirk on his face which reveals his opinion of himself to be mentally superior to those
interviewing him and to have outwitted them.
In order to convict Comey for his crimes it will
be necessary for prosecutors to prove his misdeeds by presentation of communications, working
papers, and the testimony of others involved.
If Joe Biden is elected, then Jim Comey will
get a pass for he would most likely testify against Obama, Biden, and other administration
officials in exchange for a reduced sentence.
Cyaxares_425bc 7 hours ago 1 Oct, 2020 01:23 PM
If Trump is NOT re-elected in 2020 these investigations of sedition & Federal election
interference by the FBI will be dropped by the Harris/Biden administration. (Did I say
Harris/Biden? Yes, I did).
Comey, McCabe, Steele, and others will be let off the hook, and
probably lauded by the left wing Democrats. This election is much more than appointments to
the Supreme Court & left wing ANTIFA mobs. Comey & McCabe need to be humiliated &
jailed, with Felony conviction records.
shadow1369 9 hours ago 1 Oct, 2020 12:01 PM
We have known the whole thing was a fraud from day one, evidence that we were right has been
in the public domain for years, and still none of these weasels are in jail. Unbelievable.
Reilly 6 hours ago 1 Oct, 2020 02:36 PM
The silent almost four year coup continues unabated by the remnants of the Obama and
Clintonite administration and life long deep state actors in the US government. The only
thing that will stop their prosecution is for the democrats to win the election. All the main
coup actors are democrats or life long deep state actors, only an election loss will scuttle
their long term goals for the USA.
YouLost 9 hours ago 1 Oct, 2020 11:32 AM
Just One reason they need Biden to win at any cost or else [some actors of ] the deep state are going down.
UnableSemen 6 hours ago 1 Oct, 2020 02:37 PM
Comey was trying to ingratiate himself to Hillary because he thought she would win. I'm sure
the pay code for Attorney General is higher than that for FBI Director.
ddeg 8 hours ago 1 Oct, 2020 12:26 PM
Amazing stuff, Comey, Clinton and Crew, etc. They are all "sure" when they make their
allegations but when it comes they are to answer for their allegations it becomes "I can't
recall". The American people fooled by these people are truly dumb.
RedRaindrop 10 hours ago 1 Oct, 2020 10:22 AM
What I want to know is... what was Alexander Downers role in it. The FSB could probably tell
me, but I'll wait for the official version from Canberra.
Rabidsmurf01 8 hours ago 1 Oct, 2020 12:14 PM
Looks like it was compartmentalized so much because it was a scam that the ones who actually
didn't know what was going on would've blew the whistle.
"... For societies to evolve and flourish, we all need to accept other people's viewpoints and continue open-minded, civil and respectful dialogue. In science, scientists always question everything; why shouldn't we question everything in life without personalizing and demonizing those you disagree with? It's become impossible to have rational fact-based discussions with these inflexible ideological zealots. ..."
"... The intelligentsia has created a toxic environment of indoctrination where freedom of thought and speech is outlawed. The student "mob" will enforce the process of re-education, utilizing lies, propaganda, peer-pressure and fear of cancellation. No student or adult should be intimidated, bullied or harassed to the point of unwavering compliance. There is something systematically rotten in our educational system, and it needs to be purged of these radical ideologues. These are fascist tactics - USA-style. ..."
The bitter divisions in
America are turning neighbour against neighbour and tearing families apart, amid an atmosphere
of indoctrination where freedom of thought and speech is outlawed. I fear we're on the road to
civil war.
2020 has been one hell of a year. It included getting Brexit done, Covid-19, big-tech
tyranny featuring extreme censorship by Twitter, Google, Facebook and Amazon as well as the
stealth implementation of a social credit framework by Silicon Valley oligarchs as they plunder
the economy under the diversionary power grab by pay-to-play politicians implementing
quasi-permanent unlawful lockdowns. I'm sorry to say that the USA will become a banana
republic.
In addition, the global economy is in the worst economic depression in history - one that
will only deepen as unemployment rates skyrocket as we enter the last few months of
2020.
I bet most folks wish they could put a bullet in the head of 2020 and move straight on into
2021, but there are three months left - 2020 is only 75% done. What else could go wrong?
Well in the USA, we still have to deal with a presidential election and the appointment of
Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the United States - two things that the left
are fighting tooth and nail to stop.
Since Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in 2016, US politics have not
only become highly toxic, they have also become radioactive. The swamp's resist-everything
Democratic Party, enabled by FBI bias and animus that was spun like a spider's web by the
feckless fake news media and echoed by Hollywood's hypocritical perverts, made
numerous attempts to stage a coup d'etat (carefully read the declassified letter below) of
the democratically elected president. The CIA referred an investigation to the FBI that the
Hillary Clinton campaign was colluding with Russia to impact the 2016 presidential election.
The FBI lied to the FISA judges to spy on the Trump campaign, and no one was ever
prosecuted.
Why have
FISA judges Collyer, Mosman, Conway and Dearie, who signed off on those warrants, and were
lied to by the FBI to illegally obtain those same warrants to spy on a political opposition
party during a presidential election, done nothing? Why have these Judges remained silent? Is
the entire system a stitch-up?
Now, the narrative has shifted at warp speed. It's no longer about Russian collusion. The
new narratives that matter are virtue signalling, identity politics, critical race theory,
record hypocrisy and a
dual justice system where
murder, looting and arson are justified because those on the right are all Nazis and the
radicalized left's enforcers,
ANTIFA and BLM thugs, are only " peaceful protestors
."
And nothing will interfere with this narrative. For example, the BLM mob influenced the
prosecutors by getting them to charge BLM supporter Larynzo Johnson with "
wanton endangerment " when he ran up to two police officers and shot them while rioting.
Why was this blatant assassination rampage not prosecuted as attempted murder? Is the BLM mob
now dictating charging decisions? Johnson's attempted murder of police officers has quickly
disappeared as it interferes with the media mob's narrative.
The media have drummed these themes into the heads of the public and driven a wedge between
family members, close friends and co-workers that has polarized America to the brink of civil
war. Life has become so bad in the USA that many of my several decades-old friendships recently
ended when they became unable to respect any individual opinion that differed from their own.
That has happened to me. Friends for decades have been consumed by Trump Derangement Syndrome
and are cancelling me.
For societies to evolve and flourish, we all need to accept other people's viewpoints and
continue open-minded, civil and respectful dialogue. In science, scientists always question
everything; why shouldn't we question everything in life without personalizing and demonizing
those you disagree with? It's become impossible to have rational fact-based discussions with
these inflexible ideological zealots.
I just had a long conversation with Hudson, my friend's son. He is 18 years old and is a
popular American football playing, honour-list senior attending a private school in California.
Hudson graduates this spring, and he hopes to be accepted and attend a college where he will
play football. There are around 2,000 students in his private high school. From our
conversation, I gleaned that most of Hudson's teachers and the student population are very
liberal and intolerant of anyone who has differing views.
What I found most shocking was how Hudson's teachers "teach". Today's students are not
educated; they are indoctrinated. By that, I mean "teachers" are only telling half-truths or
half of the story, so any "conclusions" the students are allowed to reach on their own are
based on inaccurate data. These teachers incorporate their bias into an indoctrination cocktail
with a dash of critical race theory in order to get the students to conform to the teacher's
world view. Hudson explained how "the loudest students at school are liberal -- I guess it's
over 98%."
Regarding the comments Hudson reads on social media channels from his school friends, he
says all are supportive of Joe Biden becoming the 46th president of the United States; none are
supporting Trump. When I asked why, he responded, "Your life would be ruined, and you would
not get into college."
On 3 November, Hudson will be voting in his first presidential election. He will be voting
for Donald Trump. But he is too fearful to discuss politics at school with his peers.
He is too
afraid to discuss politics with anyone but his parents. Terrorizing students is repugnant
and must be stopped.
The intelligentsia has created a toxic environment of indoctrination where freedom of
thought and speech is outlawed. The student "mob" will enforce the process of re-education,
utilizing lies, propaganda, peer-pressure and fear of cancellation. No student or adult should
be intimidated, bullied or harassed to the point of unwavering compliance. There is something
systematically rotten in our educational system, and it needs to be purged of these radical
ideologues. These are fascist tactics - USA-style.
Was this racism censored by Twitter? No, Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO, gave Kendi $10
million
That said, don't expect things to improve anytime soon; in fact, COVID-19 will be used as an
excuse to reset the economy. What does that mean? The oligarchs in Wall Street and in Silicon
Valley will manipulate this election result, so Kamala Harris will be the de facto 46th
president of the United States.
... ... ...
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Mitchell Feierstein is the CEO of Glacier Environmental Fund and author of 'Planet Ponzi: How the World Got into This
Mess, What Happens Next, and How to Protect Yourself.' He spends his time between London and Manhattan.
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Deeper down the rabbit hole of US-backed color revolutions.
Believe it or not, the US State Department's mission statement actually says the following:
"Advance freedom for the benefit of the American people and the international community
by helping to build and sustain a more democratic, secure, and prosperous world composed of
well-governed states that respond to the needs of their people, reduce widespread poverty,
and act responsibly within the international system."
A far and treasonous cry from
the original purpose of the State Department - which was to maintain communications and
formal relations with foreign countries - and a radical departure from historical norms that
have defined foreign ministries throughout the world, it could just as well now be called the
"Department of Imperial Expansion." Because indeed, that is its primary purpose now, the
expansion of Anglo-American corporate hegemony worldwide under the guise of "democracy" and
"human rights."
That a US government department should state its goal as to build a world of "well-governed
states" within the "international system" betrays not only America's sovereignty but the
sovereignty of all nations entangled by this offensive mission statement and its
execution.
Image : While the US State Department's mission statement sounds benign
or even progressive, when the term "international system" or "world order" is used, it is
referring to a concept commonly referred to by the actual policy makers that hand politicians
their talking points, that involves modern day empire. Kagan's quote came from a 1997 policy
paper describing a policy to contain China with.
....
The illegitimacy of the current US State Department fits in well with the overall
Constitution-circumventing empire that the American Republic has degenerated into. The current
Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, gives a daily affirmation of this illegitimacy every time
she bellies up to the podium to make a statement.
Recently she issued a
dangerously irresponsible "warning" to Venezuela and Bolivia regarding their stately
relations with Iran. While America has the right to mediate its own associations with foreign
nations, one is confounded trying to understand what gives America the right to dictate such
associations to other sovereign nations. Of course, the self-declared imperial mandate the US
State Department bestowed upon itself brings such "warnings" into perspective with the
realization that the globalists view no nation as sovereign and all nations beholden to their
unipolar "international system."
It's hard to deny the US State Department is not behind the "color revolutions" sweeping
the world when the Secretary of State herself phones in during the youth movement confabs her department
sponsors on a yearly
basis.
If only the US State Department's meddling was confined to hubris-filled
statements given behind podiums attempting to fulfill outlandish mission statements, we could
all rest easier. However, the US State Department actively bolsters its meddling rhetoric with
very real measures. The centerpiece of this meddling is the vast and ever-expanding network
being built to recruit, train, and support various "color revolutions" worldwide. While the
corporate owned media attempts to portray the various revolutions consuming Eastern Europe,
Southeast Asia, and now Northern Africa and the Middle East as indigenous, spontaneous, and
organic, the reality is that these protesters represent what may be considered a "fifth-branch"
of US power projection.
CANVAS :
Freedom House, IRI, Soros funded Serbian color revolution college behind the Orange, Rose,
Tunisian, Burmese, and Egyptian protests and has trained protesters from 50 other
countries.
As with the army and CIA that fulfilled this role before, the US State
Department's "fifth-branch" runs a recruiting and coordinating center known as the Alliance of
Youth Movements (AYM). Hardly a secretive operation, its website, Movements.org proudly lists the details of its
annual summits which began in 2008 and featured astro-turf cannon fodder from Venezuela to
Iran, and even the April 6 Youth Movement from Egypt.
The summits, activities, and coordination AYM provides is but a nexus.
As previously
noted , these organizations are now retroactively trying to obfuscate their connections to
the State Department and the Fortune 500 corporations that use them to achieve their goals of
expansion overseas. CANVAS has renamed and moved their list of supporters and partners while
AYM has oafishly changed their "partnerships" to "past partnerships."
Before & After: Oafish attempts to downplay US State Department's extra-legal
meddling and subterfuge in foreign affairs. Other attempts are covered
here .
It should be noted that while George Soros is portrayed as being "left," and the overall
function of these pro-democracy, pro-human rights organizations appears to be "left-leaning," a
vast number of
notorious "Neo-Cons" also constitute the commanding ranks and determine the overall agenda
of this color revolution army.
Then there are legislative acts of Congress that overtly fund the subversive objectives of
the US State Department. In support of regime change in Iran, the Iran Freedom and Support
Act was passed in 2006. More recently in 2011, to see the US-staged color revolution in
Egypt through to the end, money was appropriated to
"support" favored Egyptian opposition groups ahead of national elections.
Then of course there is the State Department's propaganda machines. While organizations like
NED and Freedom House produce volumes of talking points in support for their various on-going
operations, the specific outlets currently used by the State Department fall under the
Broadcasting Board of
Governors (BBG). They include Voice of America , Radio Free
Europe , Radio Free Asia ,
Alhurra , and Radio Sawa . Interestingly enough,
the current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
sits on the board of governors herself, along side a shameful collection of representatives
from the Fortune 500, the corporate owned media, and various agencies within the US
government.
Hillary Clinton: color revolutionary field marshal & propagandist,
two current roles that defy her duties as Secretary of State in any
rational sense or interpretation.
Getting back to Hillary Clinton's illegitimate threat regarding Venezuela's associations
with Iran, no one should be surprised to find out an extensive effort to foment a color
revolution to oust Hugo Chavez has been long underway by AYM, Freedom House, NED, and the rest
of this "fifth-branch" of globalist power projection. In fact, Hugo Chavez had already
weathered an attempted military coup overtly orchestrated by the United States under Bush in
2002.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/Id--ZFtjR5c
Upon digging into the characters behind Chavez' ousting in 2002, it
appears that this documentary sorely understates US involvement.
The same forces of corporatism, privatization, and free-trade that led the 2002
coup against Chavez are trying to gain ground once again. Under the leadership of Harvard
trained globalist minion
Leopoldo Lopez , witless youth are taking the place of 2002's generals and tank columns in
an attempt to match globalist minion Mohamed
ElBaradei's success in Egypt .
Unsurprisingly, the US State Department's AYM is pro-Venezuelan opposition, and describes
in great detail their campaign to "educate" the youth and get them politically active.
Dismayed by Chavez' moves to consolidate his power and strangely repulsed by his "rule by
decree," -something that Washington itself has set the standard for- AYM laments
over the difficulties their meddling "civil society" faces.
Chavez' government recognized the US State Department's meddling recently in regards to a
student hunger strike and the US's insistence that the Inter-American Human Rights
Commission be allowed to "inspect" alleged violations under the Chavez government. Venezuelan
Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro even went as far as saying, "It looks like they (U.S.)
want to start a virtual Egypt."
The "Fifth-Branch" Invasion: Click for larger image.
Understanding this "fifth-branch" invasion of astro-turf cannon fodder and the role it is
playing in overturning foreign governments and despoiling nation sovereignty on a global scale
is an essential step in ceasing the Anglo-American imperial machine. And of course, as always,
boycotting and replacing
the corporations behind the creation and expansion of these color-revolutions hinders not only
the spread of their empire overseas, but releases the stranglehold of dominion they possess at
home in the United States. Perhaps then the US State Department can once again go back to
representing the American Republic and its people to the rest of the world as a responsible
nation that respects real human rights and sovereignty both at home and abroad.
Editor's Note: This article has been edited and updated October 26, 2012.
" And I cannot forget that when David Cameron's government was so schoolboyishly
eager to give support to the rebels attacking the tyranny of Syria's President Assad, a
very senior British soldier friend said to me: 'This is the first time in my career that I
think the Russians have a point. They keep waggling their fingers and saying to us "be
careful what you wish for". They believe the anti-Assad jihadis represent a threat to us
all, and they may be right' .
Professor Sir Michael Howard, Britain's most distinguished historian and strategist,
now 92, lamented to me last month the tottering, if not collapse, of every pillar that has
supported international order through his lifetime. By that he means the UN, Nato and a
strong America . "
Actually, I am in perfect sympathy with Michael Howard, bless the old codger. I too lament
the collapse of every pillar of an international order that served us well at least part of
the time over the most recent decades.
The crisis in Ukraine marks the end of even the pretense that international law is
anything other than a tool of the western powers – they made it, they staff it and they
disobey it when they deem it is important enough.
Oh, they will cover themselves in sackcloth and ashes after their victory and say how
sorry they are, blame it on Russia and try to recover and go back to the way things were, but
the day when you could pull that off is gone because of instantaneous reporting around the
world, and it's harder for a prefabricated cover story to hold up.
Most people who are paying attention at all know we now live under the law of the gun,
and might makes right, and the western alliance will wipe its ass on every principle it
espouses if it means that's what it must do to maintain its bankster corporate empire. Those
who are content with the extension of this world order are lulled by the promise of the
national dream.
What we are seeing In the Middle East, courtesy of ISIS or IS is an enacting of the Yinon
Plan, originally published in the early 1980's. This proposed that Israel needed to
'reconfigure' its regional 'architecture' by breaking up neighbouring Arab countries into
smaller statelets predicated upon ethnicity. US neocon thinking coincided with this in 'Clean
Break' and 'Project for the New American Century'.
The destruction of existing states was key – mini ethnic statelets would find it
much harder to defend their resources against predatory outsiders and, Israel, by virtue of
their existence, would no longer be unique as a state predicated on ethnicity but as one such
state amongst a number and, because of its overwhelming military force, would be the numero uno
in the region.
Now we have some new Islamic kids on the block who're achieving exactly what Israel and a
certain strand of US foreign policy has long held as a strategic goal for the Middle East.
Which probably leads most thinking people – and I'd include Hastings here who must know
the history – to realise that the ISIS/IS story is suspect. So I'd say his job is to
direct attention elsewhere – 'we' need to ramp up the army, rally for a 'strong' and
'confident' America etc.
Hannah Arendt books is junk, as elements of totalitarim are present inmst modern sociery,
espcally neoliberal. The USA after 9/11 is one example.
Notable quotes:
"... Some émigrés who grew up in Soviet-dominated societies are sounding the alarm about the West's dangerous drift into conditions like they once escaped. They feel it in their bones. Reading Arendt in the shadow of the extraordinary rise of identity-politics leftism and the broader crisis of liberal democracy is to confront a deeply unsettling truth: that these refugees from communism may be right. ..."
"... Regarding transgressive sexuality as a social good was not an innovation of the sexual revolution. Like the contemporary West, late imperial Russia was also awash in what historian James Billington called "a preoccupation with sex that is quite without parallel in earlier Russian culture." Among the social and intellectual elite, sexual adventurism, celebrations of perversion, and all manner of sensuality was common. And not just among the elites: the laboring masses, alone in the city, with no church to bind their consciences with guilt, or village gossips to shame them, found comfort in sex. ..."
"... Heda Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was executed after a 1952 show trial, reflects on the willingness of people to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause: It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of "understood necessity," for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness. ..."
"... You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. ..."
"... In 2019, Zach Goldberg, a political science PhD student at Georgia Tech, found that over a nine-year period, the rate of news stories using progressive jargon associated with left-wing critical theory and social justice concepts shot into the stratosphere. The mainstream media is framing the general public's understanding of news and events according to what was until very recently a radical ideology confined to left-wing intellectual elites. ..."
"... For a man desperate to believe, totalitarian ideology is more precious than life itself. "He may even be willing to help in his own prosecution and frame his own death sentence if only his status as a member of the movement is not touched," Arendt wrote. Indeed, the files of the 1930s Stalinist show trials are full of false confessions by devout communists who were prepared to die rather than admit that communism was a lie. ..."
"... Similarly, under the guise of antiracism training, U.S. corporations, institutions, and even churches are frog-marching their employees through courses in which whites and other ideologically disfavored people are compelled to confess their "privilege." Some do, eagerly. ..."
"... "Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intellect and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty," wrote Arendt. ..."
"... President Donald Trump is a rule-breaker in many ways. He once said, "I value loyalty above everything else -- more than brains, more than drive, and more than energy." ..."
"... Trump's exaltation of personal loyalty over expertise is discreditable and corrupting. But how can liberals complain? Loyalty to the group or the tribe is at the core of leftist identity politics. This is at the root of "cancel culture," in which transgressors, however minor their infractions, find themselves cast into outer darkness. ..."
"... Beyond cancel culture, which is reactive, institutions are embedding within their systems ideological tests to weed out dissenters. At universities within the University of California system, for example, teachers who want to apply for tenure-track positions have to affirm their commitment to "equity, diversity, and inclusion" -- and to have demonstrated it, even if it has nothing to do with their field. ..."
"... De facto loyalty tests to diversity ideology are common in corporate America, and have now found their way into STEM faculties and publications, as well as into medical science. ..."
"... A Soviet-born U.S. physician told me -- after I agreed not to use his name -- that social justice ideology is forcing physicians like him to ignore their medical training and judgment when it comes to transgender health. He said it is not permissible within his institution to advise gender dysphoric patients against treatments they desire, even when a physician believes it is not in that particular patient's health interest. ..."
"... Like the imperial Russians, we Americans may well be living in a fog of self-deception about our own country's stability. It only takes a catalyst like war, economic depression, plague, or some other severe and prolonged crisis that brings the legitimacy of the liberal democratic order into question. ..."
"... If totalitarianism comes, it will almost certainly not be Stalinism 2.0, with gulags, secret police, and an all-powerful central state. That would not be necessary. The power of surveillance technology, woke capitalism, and fear of losing bourgeois comfort and status will probably be enough to compel conformity by most. ..."
"... At least at first, it will be a soft totalitarianism, more on the Brave New World model than the Nineteen Eighty-Four one -- but totalitarianism all the same. ..."
n 1951, six years after the end of World War II, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt
published The Origins of Totalitarianism , in an attempt to understand how such radical
ideologies of both left and right had seized the minds of so many in the 20th century. Arendt's
book used to be a staple in college history and political theory courses. With the end of the
Cold War 30 years behind us, who today talks about totalitarianism? Almost no one -- and if
they do, it's about Nazism, not communism.
Unsurprisingly, young Americans suffer from profound ignorance of what communism was, and
is. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit educational and research
organization established by the U.S. Congress, carries out an annual survey of Americans to
determine their attitudes toward communism, socialism, and Marxism in general. In 2019, the
survey found that a startling number of Americans of the post-Cold War generations have
favorable views of left-wing radicalism, and only 57 percent of Millennials believe that the
Declaration of Independence offers a better guarantee of "freedom and equality" than The
Communist Manifesto .
Some émigrés who grew up in Soviet-dominated societies are sounding the alarm
about the West's dangerous drift into conditions like they once escaped. They feel it in their
bones. Reading Arendt in the shadow of the extraordinary rise of identity-politics leftism and
the broader crisis of liberal democracy is to confront a deeply unsettling truth: that these
refugees from communism may be right.
What does contemporary America have in common with pre-Nazi Germany and pre-Soviet Russia?
Arendt's analysis found a number of social, political, and cultural conditions that tilled the
ground for those nations to welcome poisonous ideas.
Loneliness and Social Atomization
Totalitarian movements, said Arendt, are "mass organizations of atomized, isolated
individuals." She continues:
What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world, is the fact
that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social
conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our
century.
The political theorist wrote those words in the 1950s, a period we look back on as a golden
age of community cohesion. Today, loneliness is widely recognized by scientists as a critical
social and even medical problem. In the year 2000, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam
published Bowling Alone , an acclaimed study documenting the steep decline of civil
society since midcentury and the resulting atomization of America.
Since Putnam's book, we have experienced the rise of social media networks offering a
facsimile of "connection." Yet we grow ever lonelier and more isolated. It is no coincidence
that Millennials and members of Generation Z register much higher rates of loneliness than
older Americans, as well as significantly greater support for socialism. It's as if they aspire
to a politics that can replace the community they wish they had.
Sooner or later, loneliness and isolation are bound to have political effects. The masses
supporting totalitarian movements, says Arendt, grew "out of the fragments of a highly atomized
society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held
in check only through membership in a class."
A polity filled with alienated individuals who share little sense of community and purpose,
and who lack civic trust, are prime targets for totalitarian ideologies and leaders who promise
solidarity and meaning.
Losing Faith in Hierarchies and Institutions
Surveying the political scene in Germany during the 1920s, Arendt noted a "terrifying
negative solidarity" among people from diverse classes, united in their belief that all
political parties were populated by fools. Likewise, in late imperial Russia, Marxist radicals
finally gained traction with the middle class when the Tsarist government failed miserably to
deal with a catastrophic 1891-92 famine.
Are we today really so different? According to Gallup, Americans' confidence in their
institutions -- political, media, religious, legal, medical, corporate -- is at historic lows
across the board. Only the military, the police, and small businesses retain the strong
confidence of over 50 percent. Democratic norms are under strain in many industrialized
nations, with the support for mainstream parties of left and right in decline.
In Europe of the 1920s, says Arendt, the first indication of the coming totalitarianism was
the failure of established parties to attract younger members, and the willingness of the
passive masses to consider radical alternatives to discredited establishment parties.
A loss of faith in democratic politics is a sign of a deeper and broader instability. As
radical individualism has become more pervasive in our consumerist-driven culture, people have
ceased to look outside themselves to religion or other traditional sources of authoritative
meaning.
But this imposes a terrible psychological burden on the individual. Many of them may seek
deliverance as the alienated masses of pre-totalitarian Germany and Russia did: in the
certainties and solidarity offered by totalitarian movements.
The Desire to Transgress and Destroy
The post-World War I generation of writers and artists were marked by their embrace and
celebration of anti-cultural philosophies and acts as a way of demonstrating contempt for
established hierarchies, institutions, and ways of thinking. Arendt said of some writers who
glorified the will to power, "They read not Darwin but the Marquis de Sade."
Her point was that these authors did not avail themselves of respectable intellectual
theories to justify their transgressiveness. They immersed themselves in what is basest in
human nature and regarded doing so as acts of liberation. Arendt's judgment of the postwar
elites who recklessly thumbed their noses at respectability could easily apply to those of our
own day who shove aside liberal principles like fair play, race neutrality, free speech, and
free association as obstacles to equality. Arendt wrote:
The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of
civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced
their way into it.
One thinks of the university presidents and news media executives of our time who have
abandoned professional standards and old-fashioned liberal values to embrace "antiracism" and
other trendy left-wing causes. Some left-wing politicians and other progressive elites either
cheered for the George Floyd race riots, or, like New York mayor Bill De Blasio, stood idly by
as thuggish mobs looted and burned stores in the name of social justice.
Regarding transgressive sexuality as a social good was not an innovation of the sexual
revolution. Like the contemporary West, late imperial Russia was also awash in what historian
James Billington called "a preoccupation with sex that is quite without parallel in earlier
Russian culture." Among the social and intellectual elite, sexual adventurism, celebrations of
perversion, and all manner of sensuality was common. And not just among the elites: the
laboring masses, alone in the city, with no church to bind their consciences with guilt, or
village gossips to shame them, found comfort in sex.
The end of official censorship after the 1905 uprising opened the floodgates to erotic
literature, a prefiguration of our century's technology-driven pornographic revolution. "The
sensualism of the age was in a very intimate sense demonic," Billington writes, detailing how
the figure of Satan became a Romantic hero for artists and musicians. They admired the diabolic
willingness to stop at nothing to satisfy one's desires and to exercise one's will.
Propaganda and the Willingness to Believe Useful Lies
Heda Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was executed after a 1952 show trial,
reflects on the willingness of people to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause: It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your
freedom for the sake of "understood necessity," for Party discipline, for conformity with the
regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are
so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life
begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily
condemned yourself to helplessness.
You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can
also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. In pre-totalitarian states, Arendt
writes, hating "respectable society" was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept
"monstrous forgeries in historiography" for the sake of striking back at those who, in their
view, had "excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind."
For example, many who didn't really accept Marx's revisionist take on history -- that it is
a manifestation of class struggle -- were willing to affirm it because it was a useful tool to
punish those they despised. Consider the lavish praise with which elites have welcomed The
New York Times 's "1619 Project," a vigorously revisionist attempt to make slavery the
central fact of the American founding.
Despite the project's core claim (that the patriots fought the American Revolution to
preserve slavery) having been thoroughly debunked, journalism's elite saw fit to award the
project's director a Pulitzer Prize for her contribution.
Along those lines, propaganda helps change the world by creating a false impression of the
way the world is. Writes Arendt, "The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda lies in its
ability to shut the masses off from the real world."
In 2019, Zach Goldberg, a political science PhD student at Georgia Tech, found that over a
nine-year period, the rate of news stories using progressive jargon associated with left-wing
critical theory and social justice concepts shot into the stratosphere. The mainstream media is
framing the general public's understanding of news and events according to what was until very
recently a radical ideology confined to left-wing intellectual elites.
A Mania for Ideology
Why are people so willing to believe demonstrable lies? The desperation alienated people
have for a story that helps them make sense of their lives and tells them what to do explains
it. For a man desperate to believe, totalitarian ideology is more precious than life
itself. "He may even be willing to help in his own prosecution and frame his own death sentence if
only his status as a member of the movement is not touched," Arendt wrote. Indeed, the files of
the 1930s Stalinist show trials are full of false confessions by devout communists who were
prepared to die rather than admit that communism was a lie.
Similarly, under the guise of antiracism training, U.S. corporations, institutions, and even
churches are frog-marching their employees through courses in which whites and other
ideologically disfavored people are compelled to confess their "privilege." Some do,
eagerly.
One of contemporary progressivism's commonly used phrases -- the personal is political --
captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political
consciousness. Indeed, the Left today pushes its ideology ever deeper into the private realm,
leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned Arendt, is a sign that a
society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is:
the politicization of everything.
Early in the Stalin era, N. V. Krylenko, a Soviet commissar (political officer), steamrolled
over chess players who wanted to keep politics out of the game.
"We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess," he said. "We must condemn
once and for all the formula 'chess for the sake of chess,' like the formula 'art for art's
sake.' We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a
Five-Year Plan for chess."
A Society That Values Loyalty More Than Expertise
"Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their
sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intellect and creativity is still the
best guarantee of their loyalty," wrote Arendt.
All politicians prize loyalty, but few would regard it as the most important quality in
government, and even fewer would admit it. But President Donald Trump is a rule-breaker in many
ways. He once said, "I value loyalty above everything else -- more than brains, more than
drive, and more than energy."
Trump's exaltation of personal loyalty over expertise is discreditable and corrupting. But
how can liberals complain? Loyalty to the group or the tribe is at the core of leftist identity
politics. This is at the root of "cancel culture," in which transgressors, however minor their
infractions, find themselves cast into outer darkness.
Beyond cancel culture, which is reactive, institutions are embedding within their systems
ideological tests to weed out dissenters. At universities within the University of California
system, for example, teachers who want to apply for tenure-track positions have to affirm their
commitment to "equity, diversity, and inclusion" -- and to have demonstrated it, even if it has
nothing to do with their field.
De facto loyalty tests to diversity ideology are common in corporate America, and have now
found their way into STEM faculties and publications, as well as into medical science.
A Soviet-born U.S. physician told me -- after I agreed not to use his name -- that social
justice ideology is forcing physicians like him to ignore their medical training and judgment
when it comes to transgender health. He said it is not permissible within his institution to
advise gender dysphoric patients against treatments they desire, even when a physician believes
it is not in that particular patient's health interest.
Intellectuals Are the Revolutionary Class
In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by
denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine
its long-term direction.
"[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new
institutions that are created out of those networks," writes sociologist James Davison Hunter.
Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, "it does not gain
traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites" working through their "well-developed
networks and powerful institutions."
This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse. Arendt
warns that the twentieth-century totalitarian experience shows how a determined and skillful
minority can come to rule over an indifferent and disengaged majority. In our time, most people
regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals as not worthy of attention. They
mock them as "snowflakes" and "social justice warriors."
This is a serious mistake. In radicalizing the broader class of elites, social justice
warriors (SJWs) are playing a similar historic role to the Bolsheviks in prerevolutionary
Russia. SJW ranks are full of middle-class, secular, educated young people wracked by guilt and
anxiety over their own privilege, alienated from their own traditions, and desperate to
identify with something, or someone, to give them a sense of wholeness and purpose.
For them, the ideology of social justice -- as defined not by church teaching but by
critical theorists in the academy -- functions as a pseudo-religion. Far from being confined to
campuses and dry intellectual journals, SJW ideals are transforming elite institutions and
networks of power and influence. They are marching through the institutions of bourgeois
society, conquering them, and using them to transform the world. For example, when the LGBT
cause was adopted by corporate America, its ultimate victory was assured.
Futuristic Fatalism
To be sure, none of this means that totalitarianism is inevitable. But they do signify that
the weaknesses in contemporary American society are consonant with a pre-totalitarian state.
Like the imperial Russians, we Americans may well be living in a fog of self-deception about
our own country's stability. It only takes a catalyst like war, economic depression, plague, or
some other severe and prolonged crisis that brings the legitimacy of the liberal democratic
order into question.
As Arendt warned more than half a century ago:
There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by means of
liberal rationalizations. In each one of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with
the voice of common sense. The road to totalitarian domination leads through many
intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogues and precedents. . . . What
common sense and "normal people" refuse to believe is that everything is possible.
If totalitarianism comes, it will almost certainly not be Stalinism 2.0, with gulags, secret
police, and an all-powerful central state. That would not be necessary. The power of
surveillance technology, woke capitalism, and fear of losing bourgeois comfort and status will
probably be enough to compel conformity by most.
At least at first, it will be a soft
totalitarianism, more on the Brave New World model than the Nineteen Eighty-Four
one -- but totalitarianism all the same.
A Czech immigrant to the U.S. who works in academia told me that this "is not supposed to be
happening here" -- but it is.
"Any time I try to explain current events and their meaning to my friends or acquaintances,
I am met with blank stares or downright nonsense," he says. His own young adult children, born
in America and indoctrinated into identity-politics ideology by public schooling, think their
father is an alarmist kook. Can anyone blame a man like this for concluding that Americans are
going to have to learn about the evils of totalitarianism the hard way?
I grew up under a socialist authoritarian state and I recognized it in the US 20 years
ago. In the Patriot Act, to be more precise. It was the very same kind of law that I saw
enacted in the early 70s back home that turned the tide of the regime to full out repression.
You're noticing it just now because authoritarianism became bipartisan, though you have been
quite comfortable since your tribe started it.
The week after 9/11, I wrote President Bush asking him not to let something like the
Patriot Act happen. I never got a reply and wondered ever since if it went astray (it was via
email) or if anyone even read it.
<sigh> There are credible arguments to be made against the drug war, for sure, but
how exactly did the Bill of Rights get "dumped"? OK I'm willing to concede that the Fourth
Amendment got stretched beyond recognition to accommodate no-knock warrants and the like.
Which of the rest of the Bill of Rights got dumped by the drug war?
If only liberals actually understood and believed in the 9th and 10th amendments, OTOH, we
might be able to restore federal governance to something resembling sanity.
Both the 9th and 10th Amendments were finally destroyed due to the drug war. The 2nd is
collateral damage due to the increased use of home invasion raids by law enforcement see the
"firearm enhancements". It can easily be argued that the increased militarization of law
enforcement due to the drug war is a violation of the 3rd Amendment. The long sentences due
given to people for possessing or selling a plant are a violation of the 8th Amendment. The
right to a jury trial has been gutted via voir dire and the refusal of courts to recognize
the natural right of all citizens to nullify unjust laws.
I am a liberal in the sense Patrick Henry was a liberal. We should have stuck with the
Articles of Confederation.
It can't be easily argued that the drug war runs into the 3rd amendment, that is
ridiculous. Nor is the 8th amendment really a great argument, although I do get where you're
coming from.
It's obviously completely contemptuous of the idea of enumerated powers like you said
before though. Why would you not mention the 4th, 5th, and 6th amendments, which had to be
gutted for it, or the ways it runs afoul of the 14th, or basically ignores the precedent set
by the 18th and 21st amendments.
I too see where you're coming from, though I think the 9th and 10th amendments were
already in tatters long before the drug war began. For that blame the now 100 year plus build
up of the administrative state (particularly under FDR and LBJ) and the Court's enabling of
it through imaginative readings of the Commerce Clause, delegation of powers, etc. Also blame
Congress's total dereliction of duty per the above.
Add on the scheme by which the Federal govt takes everyone's money, shuffles it around and
then hands it back to the states, but only under the condition that they do what the Federal
govt tells them to do. Thus no state actually gets to build/maintain roads, develop housing
programs, expand educational access or testing, and essentially anything else without
following a million federal edicts.
The very fact that a website like this exists, and we comment on it, suggests that.. No,
we are nit under Totalitarian oppression or even an authoritarian regime. Would Stalin or
even Brezhnev have tolerated a TAC critical of the ruling party? How about Hitler, Mussolini
or Franco?
Excellent point. There are, however, concepts such as "controlled opposition" and "soft
totalitarianism" as outlined recently in Rod Dreher's piece. The latter concerns me more.
As long as Americans believe that they are getting the carrot they will not notice the
slow encroachment of the stick, particulary if it's in the hands of large
mega-corporations.
You, sir, are correct. The totalitarianism rampaging toward us is going to be a
paradoxical mix of Sexual Revolution, Cultural Marxism, and Globalist Vampire Capitalism. It
will feature elements that seem to have been predicted in Zamyatin's We , Huxley's
Brave New World , and Orwell's 1984 . It also has been foretold in Robert Hugh
Benson's Lord of the World .
I'm sure you are well aware that Rod is not suggesting such a regime is here or coming. He
has described how censorship will work / is working in painfully repetitive detail (because
obviously people need to hear it over and over again).
Under soft totalitarianism, you will make the wrong response or refuse to affirm or refuse
to attend the required re-education workshop and your job and livelihood will be gone. Don't
pretend you don't understand Rod's argument.
Jonf is for the woke soft totalitarianism, a dangerous element in the church, we Orthodox
Christian's need to be on guard with Catechumens , and their motives for joining the Church,
as well as Cradle liberals who dominate institutions in jurisdictions like GOARCH
It had bipartisan support in Congress. Do you understand how the US legislative system
works? Presidents don't unilaterally introduce and approve legislation.
It wasn't introduced by Bush, but by a nobody Republican in Congress. The act has the paw
marks of Republicans through and through. Just 3 Republican congressmen voted against.
There's no point hiding behind the bipartisan curtain.
There is much yet to be answered for in the Patriot Act origins and how it came to be
passed before anyone voting on it had a chance to read it once much less review it with
propper staffing.
That Act was sitting on a shelf, like a time bomb, waiting for its chance. I suspect it
was part of the preparations for an apocalyptic, dystopian America after a nuclear war.
It was pulled off that shelf because it was what they had on the shelf, it was there so
they used it.
"Can anyone blame a man like this for concluding that Americans are going to have to learn
about the evils of totalitarianism the hard way?"
Americans have never learned anything the easy way. They don't learn the hard way
either.
"Among the social and intellectual elite, sexual adventurism, celebrations of perversion,
and all manner of sensuality was common."
Let no future commisar say that I didn't do my part for the revolution! I stand ready to
humbly serve the people in the creation of an appropriate ministry for perversion.
Those who will have less than five sexual partners a year and do not switch gender in over
two years will be chastised for the term of 10 years by legislation.
When you remove God from your life, the inner desire implanted by God to look for the true
meaning in life, & the desire to do good instead of evil remain strong. For most people,
the "obvious" path is to give meaning to one's life is to follow the feel-good "social
justice" road, a form of false humanism (for man & by man alone), ie, social justice
without God that tries to create a paradise on earth (same way that communism tried to create
a utopia without God).
Many young Americans no longer believe in God's relevance & His authority over their
lives. This normally starts with the loss of respect for the authority of parents who
represent God in the home (even Jesus was obedient to his mortal parents). The gradual
destruction of the "domestic church", the family, in American homes is one of the immediate
goals of radical agenda (eg, gender conflicts & confusion, gender id, gender choice,
abortion, contraception, women liberation, etc) that results in increasing number of divorce
& single-parent homes.
The only way to correct the path to a radical secular future is for people, esp the young,
to regain their faith in God. The question is how. Evangelization is one. One can evangelize
by words &or by acts. St Franscis of Assisi is often quoted to have said: When you
evangelize, sometimes you need to use words. I think Rod is doing both through his books.
If God isn't implanted in a child's mind at a young age, it most likely never will.
People, in there 20's, who never went to church are unlikely to ever become Christians. If
you don't believe Heaven and Hell exist, why do you need a Savior? Look at the number of
young families with young children at Church, and consider how many aren't there. That's the
future.
The idea of God doesn't need to be implanted in a child's mind. A child (and every person
for that matter) intuitively knows that there has to be a Creator, an afterlife, and Divine
Justice. As proof, I offer the fact that every civilization that has ever existed has had a
religion with the aforementioned elements. Atheism did not appear until Marxism, and even
then, in the Soviet Union / Russia, it did not succeed in eradicating faith and religion,
which are as innate as love and sex.
Unfortunately for you atheism long predates Marxism. Look to the early Greeks for the
first recorded instances of non-believers. Try
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi... for a overview.
>"The only way to correct the path to a radical secular future is for people, esp the
young, to regain their faith in God."
Exactly the thinking powering Daesh. What is wrong with people being able to decide for
themselves what religion if any they want? Why is a secular state a radical idea? The US is a
secular state and it has served the US well.
So Revolution or Civil War?
I keep hearing about one or the other, but only on the Internet.
I am of the opinion that we Americans are far too comfortable and have no stomach for
privation.
We will continue to lurch along as always.
Does it really matter what "Americans" want? The very thesis of the article is that 'we'
will do the bidding of the influential elites, regardless of whether we a) approve of their
objectives, or b) are even aware of them. Like the article says, the vast majority of
Americans mistakenly think that, so long as they have their routine, their job, their kids,
their personal little patch of America complete with white picket fence, then, hey, how can
things go wrong? "We" won't, wouldn't, couldn't, allow such a revolution or civil war to
happen---why, there isn't even enough time to worry about it!
When a riotous mob of crazed BLM/ANTIFA soldiers comes marching up your peaceful street,
you will become part of the 'revolution', like it or not.
Totalitarian Romanov Russia united with secular pluralist France against Germany in the
lead-up to WWI. Similarly in WWII, totalitarian Marxist Russia united with the Western
democracies to defeat Nazi Germany. The pattern is common place in history. Alliances reveal
countries' motivations for war. And all are motivated by power.
https://www.ghostsofhistory...
I'll ask again (serious question): for conservatives who think we live in "Weimar
America", isn't one of the major lessons for conservatives from Weimar Germany that when
you're faced with the distasteful option of allying yourselves with liberals and the
center-left, or allying yourselves with fascists and their street militias, it's important
not to make the decision that German Nationalists did in the early 1930s?
We were allied with one of the biggest mass murderers in history during World War 2.
Joseph Stalin. Facts are facts and the facts are fascism is a leftist ideology.
To be fair, you can 'love' someone's ruling style and still go to war with them. Politics
and warfare are about seizing power, not expressing admiration for the qualities of
rivals.
To clarify, I didn't mean "love" in a personal or an emotional sense. In the case of World
War II, democratic nations were opponents of fascist nations.
I don't know what histories you have been reading but Adolph Hitler had no use for FDR as
like many other European politicians of the day, they saw FDR as a relatively ignorant
man.
The Nazis were basically 1848 (leftist) revolutionaries, who supported egalitarianism for
German men and ethnonationalism (which was a very leftist idea when it was new). True
reactionaries, like the King of Prussia in 1848, definitely did not share those values.
Can someone explain to me what the point of these arguments are? I always see people
saying the Nazis were leftists, but even if I agreed with the claim what difference does it
make to massappeal's point?
Most commentators put the Nazis on the far right. They themselves considered Nazism to be
a "third way" between Capitalism and Communism. It's clear that the defining traits of Nazism
are totalitarianism, nationalism, social darwinism, and virulent anti-semitism. Like
communism and other forms of Facism, it is a revolutionary political movement. They also
supported massive government spending and social welfare programs for "aryans", in a kind of
state-dominated capitalism. It is also true that Ernst Rohm and the SA wanted a socialist
revolution to follow the Nazi's national revolution, but they were betrayed and Rohm was
executed for being too radical.
There's the truth. Facts are Facts. So what if they are leftist or rightist? I really
don't understand the value of this argument. Is this a way to link Democrats to Nazis? Seems
as ridiculous as trying to link Republicans to them.
The point is obfuscation of reality from the US right, which has increasingly become
enmeshed in world divorced from reality. Of course no respected historian places the Nazis as
a Left ideology. There is some argument as to whether fascism/Nazism was Right, or neither
left or right. But as an ideology, fascism and Nazism are illiberal, nationalist, and
concerned with "natural hierarchies" which are anathema to "left" thought.
Anyone stating otherwise is either exceedingly stupid or not arguing in good faith. Either
way, there is no point in engaging them or in giving them any platform to spout their
nonsense. Shut them down, block them, mock them, and move on.
And conservatives wonder why they've "unwelcome" in academia...If you want to be taken
seriously, you need to think seriously.
Penetrating insight. Of course, I am sure you are right. I want to give people a chance to
defend themselves though, because I would truly love to be proved wrong and shown something
of which I am ignorant.
I really appreciate the response. I read the synopsis and gather that the argument is
somewhat similar to one which I have heard before, which is that all modern political
movements are borne of the enlightenment, which is something I certainly agree with. There
are certainly underpinnings under every modern party that find their root in the
enlightenment.
The book you provided seems to be not quite that exact theory though, and of course I
haven't read the whole thing...yet. But I honestly will, and I really appreciate the
recommendation! Truth is truth, and it has no ideology. I will read it with an open mind.
The history of right and left, nationalist and internationalist, liberal and conservative
is very complex and confusing. And it is different in America than it is in Europe. America
started out mostly Protestant and Liberal (in the classical sense), so any right wing or
conservative movement in the US would have these foundations. In Europe, conservatives were
Catholic and Monarchist.
But Monarchy gets a bad rap in American public schools and universities, dominated as they
were by Protestant and Liberal thinking at their founding and by Progressive and Socialist
thinking now.
Here is a definition of the Right by EvKL (in the book):
"The true rightist is not a man who wants to go back to this or that institution for the
sake of a return; he wants first to find out what is eternally true, eternally valid, and
then either to restore or reinstall it, regardless of whether it seems obsolete, whether it
is ancient, contemporary, or even without precedent, brand new, "ultramodern." Old truths
can be rediscovered, entirely new ones found. The Man of the Right does not have a
time-bound, but a sovereign mind. In case he is a Christian he is, in the words of the
Apostle Peter, the steward of a Basileion Hierateuma, a Royal Priesthood"
And here the difference between Right and Left:
"The right stands for liberty, a free, unprejudiced form of thinking, a readiness to
preserve traditional values (provided they are true values), a balanced view of the nature
of man, seeing in him neither beast nor angel, insisting also on the uniqueness of human
beings who cannot be transformed into or treated as mere numbers or ciphers; but the left
is the advocate of the opposite principles. It is the enemy of diversity and the fanatical
promoter of identity. Uniformity is stressed in all leftist utopias, a paradise in which
everybody should be the "same," where envy is dead, where the "enemy" either no longer
exists, lives outside the gates, or is utterly humiliated. Leftism loathes differences,
deviation, stratifications. Any hierarchy it accepts is only "functional." The term "one"
is the keynote: There should be only one language, one race, one class, one ideology, one
religion, one type of school, one law for everybody, one flag, one coat of arms and one
centralized world state"
"The rightists are "federalists" (in the European sense), "states' righters" since they
believe in local rights and privileges, they stand for the principle of subsidiarity."
Beautiful quotes, my friend, I especially appreciate the latter one. I have not gotten far
in the book, only 60 pages or so but I already find it fascinating, and I have gotten to that
quote exactly, actually.
As a passing note, I will say that I doubt WilliamRD meant what you mean, though I could
be mistaken. And I think defining Nazism as a leftist philosophy requires a semantic
argument, which redefines "right" and "left" into something different than popular American
political discourse defines it. And in fact, under these definitions, the Republican Party is
at least partially leftist.
However, EvKL is clear that this is what he is doing, and you were clear yourself that we
need to break out of these definitions. I couldn't agree more with you on that. Thanks for
sending me the link, you've made me wiser.
You are a rare and beautiful soul! I can't believe you've already read that far into the
book. I will try and learn from your example, the next time someone sends me a link.
And yes, the Republican party has been infiltrated by Leftism. I'm going to give you a
book link on this too, but you don't have to read it right away! Just download it, and put it
away in your files for later. It's a true story that is important to know and it gets to the
heart of the American Conservative / Neoconservative divide.
Fair enough. To me it's analogous to listening to someone try and argue that 1+1=7. I'm
just not sure that someone attempting such a calculation has the rational faculties to
provide anything worth hearing, and I don't like lending legitimacy to every silly position
that a person can take. Life is short, and I prefer to hear from people who demonstrate that
they're playing with a full deck and arguing in good faith. The "Leftists are the Real
Racists" crowd is certainly neither of those.
Edit: And hilariously, there is an actual RW goofball on this article's comment section,
posting Nazi/Fascist sympathies (@Raskolnik) . So, the proof is in the TAC comments I
guess...
The genetic fallacy definition can be found many places. If you read it, you might sound a
little less dumb in public. And the AAIHS is not a racist journal. I know anything with
"African American" in it seems to set off a very fragile segment of aggrieved whites, but I'm
sure you could judge the article based on its content. I'd link to some others, but given
what you've said so far, it seems unlikely you have access to JSTOR or any other legitimate
academic resources. At this point all you're really accomplishing is offering more evidence
that Right Wingers are almost allergic to information that contradicts their indoctrination.
There's a reason your numbers are falling in legitimate academic institutions, and it isn't
due to the secret cabal of communists that seem to haunt your daydreams. It's that your
positions are asinine and you're incapable of arguing effectively and supporting your
positions with evidence.
I'm just applying the same rules to blacks as get applied to whites. Imagine what the ADL
or SPLC would say of an online journal called "White Perspectives" that teaches "white
history."
I have not committed the genetic fallacy. I not only attack the source of Leftism. I
attack it's present manifestation and the false Left / Right paradigm those in its service
have constructed in order to lead us ever leftward.
Leftism's founding principle is equality. Stated synonymously, and with much historical
affirmation, this means uniformity.
The modern Left supposedly prides itself on diversity but this diversity is only skin
deep. It still craves uniformity. It has just learned that it needs brown skin in positions
of power to supplant white nonconformance, it's main opponent. The Left cannot even tolerate
the opinions of those it disagrees with. This is why it labels everyone who disagrees with
it's radical social engineering program a deplorable or a racist or an outright Nazi.
An actual theocratic monarchist reactionary would consider Nazism to be leftist, and ideas
of 'racial superiority' or 'racial guilt' or whatever to be very modern ideas.
Please expurgate your naïve realism - it's all a matter of perspective. To someone
with current mores, the Nazis, a rehash of the ethno-nationalist 1848 Revolutions in Germany,
are unspeakably reactionary. To someone with pre-Enlightenment values, they're beyond far
left. Please read something written by someone who was a 'leftist' in his own day, and it
will almost always be unspeakably reactionary by the contemporary standards of even those
'white supremacists' that you so hate. Here's some anti-immigrant racist Benjamin Franklin
for you:
"Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will
shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never
adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.
24. Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World
is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America
(exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French,
Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans
also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People
on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I
may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of
our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we
in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by
Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and
Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion
of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind. "
This block of text is nothing but another incoherent rambling from a markedly unserious
thinker. You've outed yourself repeatedly as an idiot or an ideologue. Either way, you're not
worth another breath of response.
Yes, if you simply throw out all logic and available evidence, Hitler and Mussolini were
on the political left. And if you simply redefine the entire color spectrum, the sky is green
and the sea is orange.
This is like History 101 people, get with the damn program.
Jack, if there is a nail and a head---you HIT THE NAIL ON THE HEAD!
People do seem to try to put all of this in a left-right mindset which is more "tribal
identity" than reality.
Broadly speaking ...repeat....broadly speaking----Russia and Stalin were an economic
system-philosophy while Hitler carried on the German culture model of Martin Luther, which
was much more GERMAN NATIONALISM -with a well documented anti-Semitism on steroids.
One was economic systems and the other one was nationalism. To put either into a
leftist-rightist camp doesn't work with today's terminology.
The same way that it is not possible to call Trumpicans either conservative or liberal.
The economic policies put in by Trump are reckless and certainly not conservative.
The 'point' is to establish stigma by association. History is only useful in politics when
it can used against one's enemies, either by associating with something valued or associating
stigmatized history with one's enemies. It's also possible for history to be stigmatized due
to its use by political enemies.
The point is to score points for your tribe. I find the terms "left" and "right"
increasingly useless. If they ever had value, that value is largely lost. This is especially
true in the US, where left and right seem determined to degenerate into each's caricature of
the other.
The point is to break out of the Left / Right paradigm as it's been presented to us by
those who mean to rule us. Anybody who seriously opposes the Leftwing's steady march towards
Communism, is labeled a far-right winger, and is put in the company of Nazis. They then
become untouchable by normal people who have not devoted any time into historical or
ideological inquiry.
This game forces normal people into the middle, and in the middle they pose no meaningful
threat to the Leftward march of the establishment, because the middle cannot find the
leverage to arrest its progress. The middle's only hope is to slow it down somewhat.
Fascism has perhaps not been 'on the Left' because, historically it has always arisen to
fight communism, which is the farthest Left you can get (so anything opposed to it seems, by
comparison, Right), but it is fully a child of the radical Left nationalism born of the
French Jacobins. It's certainly not a grandchild of the European monarchies, though
conservatives have at times had to ally with it as the lesser of two evils when confronted by
communism.
In the end it was a catastrophic economic meltdown--in their case taking the form of
metastatic inflation--which sent Germany off the edge of the cliff and into the abyss. So it
will be with the US. Pray we don't have a recurrence of 2007. Or worse!
There was a thing called the Great Depression that started in America but spread to Europe
quickly in 1929. Hitler came to power when millions of German workers lost their jobs and had
no way of supporting themselves and their families.
Yep. And Hitler came to power because German Nationalists (the conservative party) formed
an alliance with him, rather than with the center-left and liberal parties.
Nationalism, German or otherwise, is not particularly conservative. The most intelligent
conservative since Burke was Prince Metternich, who regarded nationalism as his greatest
enemy, especially German nationalism.
Yes, the actual hyperinflation did indeed end around that time but by then the economic
die had already been cast. The cumulative effect upon the German middle and, especially, the
working class, farmers, "petite bourgeoisie" etc.,would devastate the country through the
remainder of the 20s and into the 30s (my father and his parents, who were working class
Social Democrats, had to get out by 1928 and were lucky to gain admittance into the US as the
doors were being closed on immigration at the time). As to 2007 I totally agree that
inflation was not a factor. I was evidently unclear but--that really wasn't my point. The
absence of inflation notwithstanding, we know that the economy went into the soup in 2007--so
much so that, to date, we have not fully recovered. My main point is to express the fear that
if it were to happen again for whatever reason, if you factor in the "Kulturkampf" within
which American society is currently embroiled we are going to have one HELL of a mess on our
hands.
And given that, isn't it all the more important to try to avoid the political mistakes
German conservatives made in the early 1930s when they chose to ally themselves with the
Nazis?
Yes, it is. As we see here, conservatives like Rod think they can control the extremists.
No snark this time, they really believe that.
They couldn't even control Trump.
I think the bigger concern is the alliance of the center left with two marxist movements
especially considering the right cannot ally with nazis as there are no comparable nazi
organizations available
One of the three co-founders of BLM stated in an 2015 interview that she, Patrice Collers,
and one other cofounder, Alizia Garza, are trained marxists. If the leadership claims they
are marxist, then what is the BLM movement?
Anarchists and Marxists simply have different methods of achieving the same goal. For an
example of anarchist goals, see the collectivist actions of the Catalonian anarchists during
the Spanish Civil War.
These are both anti-democratic and dangerous movements which the center left is happy to
work with.
It was the ruinous inflation of 1923 COMBINED with the high unemployment in 1932 that
encouraged millions of ordinary Germans to vote for the Nazis twice in 1932. Some wealthy
Republicans seem to forget this as they lobby for more tax cuts and foreign aid to Israel.
They also appear to forget that the period 1871-1914 was something of a "Golden Age" for
German Jews. Germany's defeat in WWI AND the harsh peace treaty imposed on it by the other
side were more than enough to offset the benefits of a new democratic constitution adopted in
Weimar in 1919.
It is hard to believe that two decades ago, the US budget actually turned positive for a
brief period of time, that the national debt was expected to be paid off in a decade or so
and that some economists were wondering how the Fed would conduct monetary policy if there
were no Treasury securities to buy and sell. They need not have worried. These days, the
national debt is out of control. Instead of worrying about the future, I can take consolation
in the fact that I have outlived (by more than a decade) all of my father's relatives who
were still living in Poland in 1939. For them, the end of the line was an extermination camp
called Belzec.
It wasn't just the 1929 Depression that caused so much hardship in Germany. In 1933 after
Adolph Hitler came to power and Germany was just beginning to crawl out of the shock of their
own depression, the international Jewish Community (Zionists) launched its economic war on
Germany, which native, German Jews pleaded with their western brethren to not do. Ignoring
the German Jews requests, the economic war against Germany persisted, causing massive
economic disruptions as the popularity of this endeavor was picked up around the world...
The first anti-Jewish measure put in place by Nazi Germany started on April 1, 1933 when
Aryan Germans were encouraged by the government to boycott Jewish businesses in Germany. The
boycott was the first of many anti-Jewish measures taken by the Nazis over the next 12 years.
This boycott was followed on April 7, 1933 with the forced retirement of most non-Aryan (i.e.
Jewish) civil servants in the country and a book burning of books by Jewish authors on May
10. There is a whole list of anti-Jewish measures taken by Nazi Germany in the museum catalog
"Jews in German under Prussian Rule". Used copies are available at Amazon.
The economic response by Jews living outside Germany was a failure. It was the Battle of
Stalingrad and the brutal Russian winter of 1942-43 that turned the tide of WWII in
Europe
Bit off topic but not long ago I read that of all the major industrial countries the one
that supposedly suffered the least from the effects of the Depression-- was England!
The conservatives (right-liberals) have done nothing but ally with the left-liberals
against the "fascists" (actual right wing) since 1945. Their entire raison d'etre is to lose
gracefully while preventing the actual right wing from ever coming anywhere near power.
I would call that "overfitting," expecting to find exact matches among the parties
involved. My lessons:
- people can be given scapegoats in lieu of hope. "Yes, we've gutted manufacturing and
flooded the country with low-skill illegal labour, but what's keeping you down is systemic
racism. There is a secret hatred for the colour of the skin inside all white people. They
can't even see it themselves, but it's there. Just look at all these stories from the Jim
Crow era and get angry about them again, and you'll find that if you don't for me you're not
really black."
- nothing's more dangerous than a well-meaning good person convinced they're better than
everyone else, led about by skilled propagandists with total control of news and
entertainment.
- projection and false flag operations are at the top of the propagandist's toolbox. If
you're "fighting racism," you can see race everywhere and treat it as the defining aspect of
every person you meet and the source of all their opinions. If you're "fighting fascism" you
can dress in black and run around starting fires, attacking Senators, and shooting people for
their political beliefs. If you convince everyone "white supremacist terror groups" are the
biggest threat to the country you can unleash rioters on every major city to fight one rather
well-behaved seventeen-year-old in one city. You can unleash a steady stream of hoaxes:
Russiagate, a short clip of the longer George Floyd video that obscures why he died, the
Covington Catholic Smirk of Supremacy, bleach and "This is MAGA country." It doesn't matter.
The bigger the better: people will always believe the big lie.
You should think about your own role in all this. What part of Weimar are you playing?
Thanks for your thoughtful response. To answer your question, I play a
small-to-the-point-of-insignificance role these days, trying to lower the political
temperature in this time of pandemic, and trying to make the case for small 'd' democracy as
the best (and highly imperfect) method for dealing with the challenges we face.
It's in that context that I find hope in the growing number of conservatives (most
recently, former Montana governor and RNC chair Marc Racicot) who are placing "country over
party" and stating their support for Biden, not because they agree with his policies but
despite their disagreement with them.
These folks are not putting "country over party". They are tied into the Uniparty ruled by
the oligarchs doing the bidding of their masters.
Putting "country over party" would require them calling for the arrest of all those who
were involved in the Russian collusion hoax, Spygate, and everything else, from Obama on
down.
Putting "country over party" would require them to put the well-being of the citizens
first and support an end to endless war and to support enforcing immigration law and fixing
trade.
No, these every alleged Republican or conservative supporting Biden is showing that they
are and have always been a fraud who doesn't believe what they preached and would rather
continue in the good graces of the rich and powerful that really rule the country.
Support for country over politics and personal gain. Going back to the "normalcy" of the
pre-Trump political order. Pick one. You don't get both.
Anyone who tells you how important it is for "the good of the nation" to go back to the
long list of careerist politicians, hacks, and establishment elite who have governed it
towards its ruination must first make the case that the "norms" of American political culture
were good and righteous or (even from a strictly amoral view) practically useful. They never
do, though.
It's always asserted as if it is a self-evident fact that we need to go back to the days
of Bushes, Clintons, and Bidens, but nobody can really explain why.
Leftists don't want us as allies, and the 'street militias' are almost entirely leftist.
Institutional elites in Germany supported National Socialism, while in the US today they
support leftists.
Thanks for your response. Sure, there are those on the left who want nothing to do with
centrists and conservatives. (Heck, some of them barely tolerate liberals.) But the
Democratic party chose its most moderate candidate as its standard-bearer in this election,
and Biden has made clear he welcomes the support of centrists and conservatives and
Republicans.
(As for militias, per the FBI (not known as a bastion of liberalism) right-wing militias
are by far the largest domestic terrorism threat.)
Like the Republican party in the Trump era, there is no longer such a thing as the
Democratic party in its traditional sense. As the GOP is an empty vessel now filled with
Trumpism, the Democratic party is an empty vessel being filled with progressivism (an ongoing
process). The traditional Democrats (like old-school moderate African-Americans) who put
Biden over the top in the primary are otherwise powerless in the party.
Biden has made it clear that he will not push back against the far Left in any way - in
his refusal to comment on packing SCOTUS, ending the Senate filibuster, ending the electoral
college (the lack of an answer to these being itself an answer), in his absorption of much of
Bernie's platform into his own, in his silence on urban riots and looting until campaign
people told him it was affecting polling (and his response since has been tepid at best).
He lied gleefully (Trumpily?) during the debate about the prog platform - his own campaign
website lists support for GND and an expanded "reimagining" of the suburbs among many other
progressive goals which Trump is too inarticulate and ignorant to frame sensible arguments
against.
The Democrats are planning to govern on the basis of vengeance and revolution. The mood of
the base could not be more clear.
Thanks for your response. Unlike the Republican party, the Democratic party still has a
party platform that extends beyond (far beyond, 90 pages beyond) fealty to its party leader.
As Biden won a majority of the delegates, the platform those delegates adopted reflects the
views of the factions that chose Biden more than it does any other faction in the party.
Biden has pointedly and repeatedly distanced himself from the policy wishes (e.g.,
Medicare for All, Green New Deal, defund the police) of the left-wing of the Democratic
party.
Vice President Biden knows there is no greater challenge facing our country and our world.
Today, he is outlining a bold plan – a Clean Energy Revolution – to address
this grave threat and lead the world in addressing the climate emergency.
Biden believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate
challenges we face. It powerfully captures two basic truths, which are at the core of his
plan: (1) the United States urgently needs to embrace greater ambition on an epic scale to
meet the scope of this challenge, and (2) our environment and our economy are completely
and totally connected.
Biden will implement the Obama-Biden Administration's Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing
Rule requiring communities receiving certain federal funding to proactively examine housing
patterns and identify and address policies that have a discriminatory effect. The Trump
Administration suspended this rule in 2018.
Giving Americans a new choice, a public health insurance option like Medicare. If your
insurance company isn't doing right by you, you should have another, better choice. Whether
you're covered through your employer, buying your insurance on your own, or going without
coverage altogether, the Biden Plan will give you the choice to purchase a public health
insurance option like Medicare. As in Medicare, the Biden public option will reduce costs
for patients by negotiating lower prices from hospitals and other health care providers. It
also will better coordinate among all of a patient's doctors to improve the efficacy and
quality of their care, and cover primary care without any co-payments. And it will bring
relief to small businesses struggling to afford coverage for their employees.
I don't deserve your thanks, kind sir. You're vastly overestimating the social importance
of presidential elections, imo. And I don't believe the FBI. Every other institution in
American society is virtue signaling support for the woke left, so why not them? They know
who is going to run the country next year. Do you believe that the rioting and destruction
this summer was caused by right-wingers? I have heard that conspiracy theory before, and I
suppose it's the closest thing we'd ever get from leftists to an admission that the events
were negative.
I think that there is definitely a strong double standard when it comes to media reporting
and institutional acknowledgment of violence based on the demographics and politics of the
perpetrator. There was a huge mass shooting in the city I live in last year, but the shooter
(DeWayne Craddock) was black and had a stereotypically black given name. There was very
little reporting on it as compared with the Texas church shooter that occurred at about the
same time.
No, because we on the Left are always the greater evil.
Always.
The (few) bad tendencies of (some, very few) people on the Right can be contained and
governed by the other conservatives.
/SNARK
In Germany, the national socialists and communists were battling for totalitarian control.
Both of them were on the left. Dictatorship either way.
The real question today in the US is whether old fashioned liberals [belief in free
speech, political discourse without threats or actual violence, natural American patriotism,
etc] will disavow the violence and intimidation from the leftist totalitarianism that is the
democrat party today.
The rioting, the burning, the street violence, the death threats of lining people against the
wall, etc., etc., is pretty much all from the totalitarian left. I could give you hundreds of
examples, the most recent the former CEO of Twitter wanting to shoot political opponents.
This hate-filled rhetoric from the totalitarian left is an attempt to dehumanize people
they disagree with, to hate them. This is simply preparing for the stage that those the
totalitarian left disagrees with should be sent to gulags at a minimum, or killed.
This is all with the approval and help of the "mainstream' democrat party. Denying this
just makes you not credible.
p.s. Biden, at best, is a partial senile figurehead, whose function is to mask what the
totalitarian left really wants to do.
Oh what Jonah Goldberg has wraught with this "NAZI's we're leftists" horseshit. I guess
when you be been absolved of the notion that right wing thought had anything to do with the
rise of fascism in Europe, you can say any horrible thing you'd like about people of another
race, ethnicity, or religion ruining your pretty Lilly white country.
From Wikipedia:
"As the eldest son of Bertha Krupp,
Alfried was destined by family tradition to become the sole heir of the
Krupp concern. An amateur photographer and Olympic sailor, he was an
early supporter of Nazism among German industrialists, joining the SS in
1931, and never disavowing his allegiance to Hitler."
Thanks for your response. In case anyone else still isn't clear, and just for the record,
the Nazis were not "on the left".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
The national socialists were on the left. You may lie about it, I can't stop you.
But what is definitely clear is the national socialists were brutal evil totalitarianists
[new word?]. Just like the communist dictatorships in russia, china, cambodia, cuba, etc.
This is the leftists/wokesters blm antifa [the brownshirts of today] in the US, with the
tacit/explicit approval of democrat leadership.
They would not have been better off aligned with Stalin, which was the other side in their
domestic political extremes. It too was rioting in the streets.
The middle got too narrow to survive. That does not mean the other extreme was an
acceptable choice, much less a better choice.
No. For example, the Nazis and the Communists *combined* only accounted for 40% of the
parliamentary seats after the 1930 election. If the center-right, centrist, and center-left
parties had formed an alliance, they could have governed the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
I'm not really a conservative, but I share many concerns and values with conservatives. I
do agree that it's better to ally with liberals and the center-left than to join right-wing
authoritarians, and for that reason I have, however reluctantly, cast my mail-in vote for Joe
Biden.
That said, I think you misinterpret the choice that ultimately faced German nationalists
in 1932. By that time, the liberals and center-left had shrunk to powerlessness at the
national level, and the republic itself was dead in all but name. The choice as the German
nationalists saw it, and very likely as it actually was, was to join the communist KPD or the
fascist National Socialists, both of whom were determined to kill the republic. Even a
friggin' restoration of the Kaiser would have found more support at that point than the
continuation of a liberal center-left republic which had been thoroughly repudiated by all
the strongest players.
In retrospect, we know that even the KPD might have been less bad than the National
Socialists, because the KPD probably wouldn't have blundered into another world war
like the National Socialists did (Stalin, after all, avoided war with the USA and UK). But
that would have been hard for German nationalists to foresee in 1932. The obvious question
for them in making their choice was "Whose death list am I on?" If you were a business owner,
independent farmer, or churchman, your chance of survival seemed better under the National
Socialists; if you were nonwhite, or gay, or Jewish (always remember many German Jews were
fervently nationalist; some of the men murdered in the camps had won Iron Crosses in World
War I), you would have a better chance of survival under the KPD. If the businessmen, farmers
and churchmen could have foreseen that the National Socialists were going to throw away their
lives in another pointless war, they might have taken their chances with the communists
instead.
Switching now to modern America, it seems as hard to predict now as it was for the Germans
in 1932 which party will get us into a massive bloodbath overseas. Trump talks the
nonintervention talk sometimes, but he never withdraws troops, twice came within a micron of
getting us into a war with Iran, and consistently behaves bellicosely with foreign powers.
Biden's record in supporting the Iraq War and the Libya intervention show that a vote for
Democrats is no sure vote for peace either. In any case, dying in a conventional war is a
very remote risk for most Americans; our forces are too strong and technologically advanced.
Nazi Germany lost seven times more dead just invading Poland than America lost in the whole
Afghanistan war. The true nightmare scenario for America is nuclear war with Russia, and
there's no dispute about which party is more hostile to Russia.
My point is, if we've truly reached 1932 Weimar, it's already too late to ally with
liberals and the center-left. The far right and the far left were their only options, and
both led to disaster.
My fervent hope is that we're still closer to 1929 Weimar than 1932. The republic is sick,
perhaps dying, but not everyone has lost faith in it; below the level of the political and
media elites, confidence in the republic is still strong. The US military still supports the
republic to an extent the Reichswehr never did. Biden is no fire-breathing radical; he's an
establishment man to his bones. He has no idea how to cure the republic, and his policies
helped bring it to this low ebb, but at least he isn't out to murder it. That's why I was
willing to vote for him. But it's merely a stopgap measure. The far left is busily taking
over Biden's party, and far from resisting it, he sees it as a useful ally against the right.
The far right, of course, has long been doing the same to the Republican Party. We may not
have arrived yet at 1932's dreadful choice between cutthroats, but we are speeding down that
road, and it is crazy to imagine that a mere presidential vote for either of these two clowns
is going to change our course.
What will change our course? I have only the haziest idea, and I'm eagerly looking forward
to Rod's book for suggestions.
This is the best answer, but radicals will just look at your "whose death list am I in"
argument and say "yep the bourgeoisie should die, and so should anyone who supports
them".
Agreed that this is a thoughtful response. While I may even more reluctantly cast my
ballot for a despicable lunatic instead, I relate to much of the above.
In the 1928 German elections, 15 political parties won seats in the Reichstag
(parliament), with the Nazi party winning fewer than 3% of the seats. Germany's proportional
system of allocating seats meant that even small parties could end up with a small number
seats. Two years later, 15 parties again won seats in Reichstag elections. The Nazi party
made the biggest gain in seats at the expense of more centrist parties. In both national
elections held in 1932, 14 political parties won seats, with the Nazi party winning the most
seats. The popularity of the Nazi party grew as economic conditions in the country
worsened.
In 2020, the Covid-19 virus may have merely accelerated trends which were already in place
in the US.
That's a stupid false equivalency and a scarecrow argument in one, maybe even a no true
scotsman to go with that. You're aware that there were several conservatives opposing Hitler,
right? Opposition wasn't just carried out by the far-left, some of which were in the
SA/The Nazi party themselves . See: strasserism.
Rod, I agree with you about Arendt and her classic work, the best work in political
history/theory of the 20th Century imo. But there is a reason why no one quotes it today. You
mention only the last chapter of TOoT, but in Part II she goes into great detail about how
capitalism led to imperialism which used racism as a means to that end. The "mob" originates
with those displaced by The Great Transformation (Polyani's term) brought about by capitalism
and the rise of bourgeois society . . . it is this mob that later forms the basis for
totalitarian movements. Arendt's analysis covers a period of about 400 years, not simply the
aftermath of World War I which was a result of the crisis that had already begun, that is the
dissolution of the nation state . . .
But that would be uncomfortable to point out, as it is the rise of right wing economics
that was destroyed the middle class in this country, and lead us to this parlous state.
For a long time, the right has happily embraced the culture wars to hide the destruction
of the libertarian economic policies, that as always are looking for a way to crush labor
power.
An anaylsis of the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe and East Asia that leaves out the
World Wars is like an American history text that leaves out the Civil War. In every single
Eurasian country from Hungary east to North Korea where the Communists came to power WWI
and/or WWII was a key factor. No war, no Communist takeover. (And it regards to the Nazis in
Germany WWI is also a crucial factor on their coming power)
What would play the role of those wars in our future if some manner of totalitarian
government of the Left or Right junked the Constitution and seized power by force?
To be sure, none of this means that totalitarianism is inevitable. But they do signify that
the weaknesses in contemporary American society are consonant with a pre-totalitarian
state. Like the imperial Russians, we Americans may well be living in a fog of
self-deception about our own country's stability. It only takes a catalyst like war,
economic depression, plague, or some other severe and prolonged crisis that brings the
legitimacy of the liberal democratic order into question.
Again, why are you responding to an argument that Rod is not making? He didn't write The
Handmaid's Tale,
What were the catalysts for Cuba or Venezuela? Or the many socialist regimes in Africa,
the Middle East and Latin America during the postwar decades?
Revolutions against outside imposed dictatorships left over from a soft imperialism.
Platt Amendment, Banana Wars, School of the Americas and coups for days set up the
conditions for people to not trust there near neighbor oppose to its distant enemies during
the Cold War and the legacies from it created the social conditions for. We as a state
literally supported death squads in Central America. Leading to the weak states and strong
gangs in the region. The seeds of any empire bear bitter fruits. It is also where the police
state we now see was created and imported home.
As is so often the case, there are various partial truths in what you say but they don't
add up to the simplistic conclusion. BTW Venezuela was a relatively wealthy and successful
country when Chavez took over; the factors you list were long before and not involved. Rather
what happened was existing inequities and problems were utilized to enable a power grab. In
the same way that poor blacks and other minorities are being used to enable the current power
grab, divide and conquer as always - in the end, they will be just as removed from power as
they are now. Like all the woke white chicks, they are just considered useful idiots for the
progressives seeking power.
We as a state literally supported death squads in Central America. Leading to the weak
states and strong gangs in the region. The seeds of any empire bear bitter fruits.
Not that simple. The weak states and strong gangs came first. The weak states and corrupt
governments and deep inequities created the instabilities that motivated insurgencies. Lack
of a rule of law and the inability of the state to protect you forces people to turn to (and
form) gangs for protection. All of this played out against a backdrop of a global conflict
between two empires, two ideologies which further fueled all the conflicts.
There were death squads and all sorts of other abuses on all sides. There are no clean
hands in such a conflict. It was not possible to remain neutral unless you were Swiss.
All of the problems you cite concerning central america are an outgrowth of the
"governments" the US government/business imposed on those countries. The societies of central
and south america were and are highly stratified with "Europeans"--ancestry--occupying the
highest rung and receiving the lions share of the wealth. That's the reason Castro and Chavez
had such an easy time overthrowing the governments and why there is so much resistance to a
return of the previous conditions.
International relations and history are a lot more complicated than you think they are.
The endless desire for Americans to find quick and dirty feel-good good vs bad answers to
everything goes a long ways towards explaining the degrading of this society and its
governance.
I note again that Venezuela was in a rather different state than pre-Castro Cuba. But yes
having a large underclass that feels disconnected and deprived of what the rest of a society
has goes provide fertile fuel for revolution.
MS13 and Barrio 18 were born in the US from refugees fleeing our dirty wars in Central
America. Poor wealth distribution leads to it. So glad you realize wealth focus is bad. Also
oligarchs are bad. We supported those corrupted governments leading to the revolutions
leading to the net result. Ever hear of United Fruit and the banana men? Imperial Companies
support weak government because they can influence it.
Well the catalyst for Cuba was Batista staging a coup, seizing power, and destroying the
democratic process (with full US support) in 1952. Less than 10 years later, a popular
revolution overthrew him. That revolution has proven a much tougher nut to crack. It's almost
as if overthrowing democracy and giving into a strongman's appetite for power has
consequences down the road.
One could also say that trying to jump start / leap frog your way into equality and
"justice" also has consequences down the road. A lesson that humans absolutely refuse to
learn, thus condemning generation after generation into misery.
No one "gives into a strongman's appetite for power". People make choices based on
incentives and possible outcomes. Rod uses the Franco example often. People often have to
choose between two terrible outcomes - in which case they choose the one that has a better
chance of their own survival or the survival of what they care about.
I can't comment about east Asia because I don't now enough about it, but as the great
historian John Lukacs never tired of saying, the only country in Europe where the Bolsheviks
triumphed politically was Russia. The Spartacists and the Bela Kun horror fizzled out. After
the second war the Communists needed the Red Army to set up puppets. There was no
"revolution" in Poland, Czech, Hungary or anywhere because nobody wanted it. Yugoslavia may
be a partial exception, but look what happened to Yugoslavia.
Good point. I guess we could make the argument that the Red Army sweep over Eastern Europe
and absorption of all those countries into the Soviet empire required WW2 to occur, but that
seems like not the argument that Jon is making in response to Rod's thesis.
I was agreeing with him. But "what would play the role of those wars in our future" would
be...a war. Which Biden (or, the Pentagon) has up his sleeve ("America is Back"). Experto
crede. Do you not believe that the Kagan/Rubin/Boot crowd would shy from a shooting war with
Russia? Because I don't.
Thankfully empty-headed blabbers like Rubin and Boot are well removed from actual power
(and even, I would say, influence - in fact it is unclear to me why anyone publishes their
rantings). The people with influence in a Biden administration will be people like Harris,
Warner, AOC, etc. I don't think they're really aching for a war.
But the point is that you don't need a war - the catalyst can be another major event like
economic depression, a global pandemic, etc, etc.
Well, we're asking the who/whom question only one way, it seems to me. Everybody is
rightly convinced that on social and economic issues AOC and Princess Tiger Lily will have
the wheel in a Biden administration. But who's to say that in foreign policy Gersonism won't
prevail? All these never Trumpers are going to be looking for their rewards. Remember,
Hillary destroyed Libya as a resume enhancer. And the Army has gone left. One of the things
Trump mideast deal has done is set up a Sunni/Shia showdown. Why not follow through?
Fair enough. I suppose that's possible, and the young AOC type progs barely know where
anything on the globe is outside the US so they might be happy to let the old "experts" take
back over foreign policy. Not where their interests lie, for sure.
I disagree about the mideast deals, though - a Sunni vs Shia conflict has been baked into
the cake from the beginning (see: Iran Iraq war), and it was Obama's crazy Iran deal that
started everyone back on that path by strengthening Iran and trying to push it into place as
a regional hegemon. That was never going to go down with the Sunni countries.
The apparently not actually so naive Kushner was able to take advantage of new incentives
that Obama's machinations created. I see this as quite positive.
We'll agree to disagree about the mideast, which I really just brought up e.g. The one
they're really lusting for is a shooting war with Putin. Have you read Gerson on that
subject? What's the outcome of Mrs. Sikorsky's bellicosity but that? What else has all this
NATO expansion been for, anyway?
Haven't read Gerson in a while. I see your point, though I don't really think any of these
people are quite reckless enough to lust for a war with a nuclear power.
Partially correct. Czechoslovakia was an exception: Communists came to power as a result
of a free election in 1946. But it was something of an outlier, probably the most left-wing
country in Europe.
It was Bush 43's costly Middle East adventures at a time when he was cutting income taxes
that set the US economy on the terrible path it is on now. Our national debt is out of
control. Many young people will leave college with massive student loan debt, poor job
prospects and, in many areas, very expensive housing. We have paid and will continue to pay a
very high price for trying to be the world's policeman.
Obama, the wild eyed leftist spender, cut the 1.2 trillion dollar deficit that W ran up
with his tax cuts and catastrophic war down to 585 billion. By the end of '19, before any
Covid-19 spending took place, Trump had run it back up to 984 billion. Growth has been a
meager two tenths of one percent higher in the first three years of Trump's presidency than
it was during the last three years of Obama and it has come at a high cost.
"...which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political Consciousness."
Which explains the absurd phenomenon of polically-correct stand-up comics. Guess what?
They're not funny. 'Whimsy' won't get you belly laughs. Trump still gets the belly laughs.
Even from me, and I hate his rotten stinking guts with the white hot fury of a thousand
suns.
A hundred years ago, Newtonian physics got nuked. Goodbye ordered universe, hello entropy
and chaos. And we've been mopping up the fallout ever since. Ironically, years before, The
Enlightenment had already started this dissolution process. So can you blame Picasso and
Joyce for just trying to see things as they really are(?)
Griel Marcus traces this process in his great book Lipstick Traces. From The Brethren of
the Free Spirit to the Cathars to St. Just to the Paris Commune to Duchamp and right up to
The Sex Pistols, we are either fallen, or trying to achieve the colliding energy of a mere
collection of atoms. The Lettrists even took a cue from Finnegans Wake and carved up the damn
language, for Chr--sakes. And they've been doing it ever since.
So can you blame the great Stockard Channing, in Six Degrees of Seperation, 1993, for
meditating on a Kandinsky and then coming to the same conclusion that many of us poor
benighted souls have in these absurd times: 'I am all random.'
Arendt's fine. But I'll go with Carville's "It's the economy stupid".
When a young man who isn't "college material" has no economic future, he's going to find a
way to make one. If it requires totalitarianism, so be it. Indeed, totalitarian ideologies
can only flourish in an environment when bored, penniless young men have the time to read up
on them.
Imagine all of those black guys rioting or white skinheads having to get up early in the
morning for 10 hours of hard-work at the factory or on someone's roof. A couple of beers
after work and your ready for bed, not revolution. Hence the great America of the '50's - the
'80's.
I have no idea what's coming, but we are trying to reduce our exposure by moving out of
the city, as far as we can reasonably go for now until retirement. We are frantically trying
to get our house on the market and hoping that thanks to the magic of "gentrification"
(hopefully prospective buyers won't notice the giant "F*** Gentrifiers" spray painted on a
nearby wall) we can trade our overvalued home into two properties - one in a distant town
past the outer suburbs and another somewhere overseas where we can run to when things get
really bad. That's the dream, at least. But the city we have already left and won't be going
back.
I'm sure the overseas locations will be absolutely overjoyed to have a couple of US
refugees, with no ties to the country or area, who don't speak the language or have any
cultural understanding or background, and expect to instantly be fully integrated into the
economic and social fabric, showing up.
Have you considered that you'll be akin to a Central American family moving into the outer
suburb neighborhood you desire to live in, albeit one with more resources and legal
status?
"Trump's exaltation of personal loyalty over expertise is discreditable and corrupting.
But how can liberals complain? Loyalty to the group or the tribe is at the core of leftist
identity politics."
Just when you thought the hypocrisy and the double-standard had reached the limits of what
is humanly possible, Biden takes it up a notch.
After spending the last few months tearing up cities and threatening to burn down the country
if they don't win in November, the Democrats now accuse Trump of putting the Proud Boys on
stand-by???
Even my dog is laughing at this.
[How do these kooky communists even get elected to dog-catcher???]
Just saying both sides are playing this game. One is just doing it with more guns and
state security support. The left has greater cultural focus cause those are the positions
that interest them. This is the creation of capitalism.
If Rod paid more attention to all the data and not just those that feed his hysteria, he'd
learn that there are all kinds of backlash within liberal and far left circles to the
excesses he rightly decries. In fact, I think there is more self-correction and
self-regulation going on within "the left" than on Rod's side of the spectrum
Do you have any examples of this self correction? I've been living in a far left
neighborhood in a permanent liberal Democratic city for decades, and I don't see it (well now
we fled so I can't speak for what happens next).
There are occasionally people who will whisper something in my ear or my wife's ear that
suggests they recognize some lunacy that's going on. But they would never admit that
publicly. And all evidence suggests there are still very few of such people.
The whole point of Rod's thesis is that the vast majority of people will go along with the
tide even if they don't believe it - they will live their lives by lies. Very few people have
the courage to take a stand in such circumstances, as history makes all too clear. The
progressive left, again as has been made clear over and over, now owns all the institutions
that matter in the US - with woke capitalism being the final crown. What Rod says is coming,
is coming.
Without the '65 "immigration reform" act none of this would be happening. This isn't the
result of personal loneliness, it's the inevitable result of becoming, in Eugene McCarthy's
phrase, a colony of the world. The radical turn to the left is a direct result of anti-white
bloc voting by immigrants. (Indeed you have to be willfully blind not to notice the high
percentage of spokesmen for the extreme left who are immigrants or the children of
immigrants.) This is a race war against white America, in which the cultural establishment
and the government they shape are the leading protagonists. Classic racist colonialism, with
the bizarre twist that perhaps a third of the white population supports the annihilation of
their own peoples and cultures. For the others it's simply a Scramble For America, a rush to
get money, territory, and power with the natives footing the bill.
Irrelevant. It's the immigrant vote that puts them over. The vast majority of immigration
is non-white. It's immigration that has California not electing a Republican to statewide
office in 15 years, and nothing else. Don't take my word for it, the left itself has been
telling Republicans for decades that the demographics are against them. It's an
acknowledgement of the reality of identity bloc voting and the reason they support open
borders. In any case, I mentioned you when I wrote about that mentally ill third of whites
that supports self-annihilation.
"""It is probably as true that violence breeds fanaticism as that fanaticism begets
violence. Fanatical orthodoxy is in all movements a late development. There is hardly an
example of a mass movement achieving vast proportions and a durable organization solely by
persuasion. It was a temporal sword that made Christianity a world religion. Conquest and
conversion were hand in hand. Reformation made headways only where it gained the backing of
the ruling prince or local government. The missionary zeal seems rather an expression of some
deep misgivings. Proselytizing is more a passionate search for something not yet found than
to bestow upon the world something we already have. The proselytizing fanatic strengthens his
own faith by converting others.
A true believer is eternally incomplete and eternally insecure.
Mass movements do not usually rise until the prevailing order has been discredited. A full
blown mass movement is a ruthless affair, and its management is in the hands of ruthless
fanatics. A Luther who when first defying the established church, spoke feelingly of "the
poor, simple, common folk," proclaimed later when he allied with the German princelings, that
"God would prefer to suffer to government to exist no matter how evil, rather than allow the
rabble to riot, not matter how justified they are in doing so."
"Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass
movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a
devil."
However, the freedom the masses crave is not freedom of self-expression and
self-realization, but the freedom from the intolerable burden of an autonomous existence.
They want freedom from the arduous responsibility of realizing their ineffectual selves and
shouldering the blame for the blemished product. They do not want freedom of conscience, but
faith -- blind, authoritarian faith. """"""
Biden of course is scarcely a totalitarian figure--Trump is more suited to that role. But
Biden would fit nicely as a von Hindenburg for the Loony Left.
How in the hell is Trump a totalitarian figure? I hear this calumny hurled at him time and
time again, but without any specifics. Tell me, what specific totalitarian actions has he
actually taken?
Support for violent white supremacist groups. Using the Dept. of Justice to target
political enemies. Adopting a Republican platform that consists solely of fealty to the party
leader.
Over the past 6 months or so, my husband has been listening to a lot of Jordan Peterson
and I have definitely noticed a shift in his thinking. A good one! I, myself, just finished
listening to his book, 12 Rules For Life and am now going through his Podcast episodes. It's
quite fascinating! Rogan has also received a lot of flak for having Peterson on his show
several times.
I went and listened to the episodes with Abigail Shrier and Douglas Murray (at your
suggestion) and now have their books (as well as your's) sitting in my audible library.
Most of what you say is true, save for the usefulness of the "experts", the credentialed
ones who have shown themselves to be absolute morons, incompetents and political hacks.
(Think, Fauci.)
Imagine if one hundred years ago you told the founding stock of this nation that every
American institution would be weaponized against their own history and heritage. Imagine if
you told them our universities, media, churches and immigration system were all being used to
demonize and demographically displace their own posterity. They must be rolling over in their
graves because that is exactly what is happening.
In 1920? Large numbers of them absolutely would have believed it. In fact, millions of
them *did* believe it. The country was being overrun by Italians, Poles, Greeks, Serbs,
Russians. A frightening number of them were Jews and Catholics. They smelled funny, spoke
weird languages, had bizarre beliefs and customs, cooked and ate strange foods. They were
lazy bums who were taking all our jobs. At a rally in Rhode Island, the Grand Imperial Wizard
proclaimed to thousands that the KKK stood for undying opposition to "Koons, Kikes, &
Katholics".
And it's come true! Look, for example, who's on the Supreme Court.
Not to mention that the Jews were over-running colleges. Keeping them out required changes
to admissions practices to make things other than pure academic ability deciding factors.
Hence the emphasis on "the whole person", where a good background, good family, athletic
ability, and being someone you'd want to associate with in your club began to over-ride
performance on the academic tests that had previously been used to determine admissions.
Just soft totalitarianism? That seems incredibly pollyann-ish - delusionally
optimistic.
If Biden wins, the USA, the EU and Red China will move swiftly to exterminate the remnants of
Christian Civilisation - and anybody associated with it.
Bishop Vigano seems to share this view. (
https://www.lifesitenews.co...
[Anyway, we ALREADY have "soft totalitarianism". Need proof? Just go down to your HR
department and tell them that you believe homosexual activity is immoral.]
As much as somebody may dislike Trump's personality, Biden is just not an option.
Biden = ethno-cultural extinction
As adults, we don't get to indulge our own childish sensitivities. We don't get to
participate in this political fantasy-land alt-universe - where monstrous evil is praised as
virtuous, and goodness is labelled as vice.
Just go down to your HR department and tell them that you believe homosexual activity
is immoral.
I imagine you'll get a reaction similar to that if you went down to HR and ranted about
how sex outside of marriage is immoral, or lectured how sodomy is a crime against nature and
its practitioners deserve to burn in Hell.
I used to have a Ukrainian woman on my staff. When my younger staff all started in 2016
expressing support for Sanders she freaked. Then she freaked over Trump.
We are screwed. My decision to vote for Biden is predicated upon the hope that a boring
gaff prone Biden presidency will allow a return to normalcy.
A vote for Biden is a vote for the radical totalitarian left. Packing the supreme court.
Ending the Senate Filibuster and open borders. The country as we know it will be over.
Certain end of the First and Second amendments. I don't find you credible at all
"... The REASON they won't release them: The TRUMP Collusion wasn't with the Russians , but with APARTHEID Isra-h-e-l-l. But NO ONE will investigate that. M.A.G.A. is out. M.I.G.A is in. ..."
"... 'Bloody Gina' is Trump's loyalist appointee, following through on what loyalist Pompeo started to protect Trump Crime Family Corruption, Chabad Mafia, and ZOG. ..."
"... please allow me to still congratulate Gina on reducing the almighty Third Option into the Toiletpaper Option. ..."
"... 2018, BREAKING: Trump appoints Haspel as first female CIA director ..."
"... 2017: Breaking: CIA Director Mike Pompeo appoints Haspel as the first female CIA officer to be named deputy director. ..."
"... Fathead and Esper were best buds at West Point.. ..."
"... Evidence destruction was one the main purposes of the Mueller "investigation". ..."
"... Please. If you can see what Trump has done, basically bending the US and its taxpayers over for Israel, you'd realize he's just another in a long line of AIPAC Presidents. Ain't nobody opposing him. CIA knows what Russia knows about him, and they're just using him as bait. ..."
"... proof is in the pudding, Hillary still walks free, none of the corrupt ones are in jail and won't ever go to jail. Face it, Biff has many fooled. ..."
"... U.S. Navy Reserve Doctor on Gina Haspel Torture Victim: "One of the Most Severely Traumatized Individuals I Have Ever Seen" ..."
"... What bothers me more is how deep the Deep State goes in Washington. They totally control the government and without mass firings it is impossible to even make a dent in it. This country is gone and just doesn't know it yet. Once Kamala is crowned as queen reality will come slamming home pdq. By the time the country realizes what has happened to them it will be way too late, no matter how many guns they have at home. Once they cut off access to your money, very few people will be independent enough to survive on their own. ..."
"... Trump has opened the eyes of more Americans to the simple fact that an unelected bureaucracy is running the country ..."
"... DJT hired this c8nt, sure, but the pool of candidates equipped to take over the CIA is very small, and all are career swamp things. If DJT put in a true outsider, the ranks would close and the "Director" would know nothing, could do nothing, and nothing would change. The ranks would just wait for another President. Trump is powerless over the CIA. After all, they could easily have him 'accidentally' killed; they've done it before. ..."
"... The CIA just needs to be dissolved in acid. The political, psychological and historical deep-rooted corruption isn't fixable by anyone. ..."
"... McConnell would never confirm a "true outsider". Mitch is the real problem here, he tells Trump who he will and will not confirm, so Trump has to accept one of Mitch's choices. ..."
"... He could put in Mike Flynn. And any vested employee who "closed ranks" would go on immediate and permanent furlough. ..."
"... Here's something we Americans can learn from the Russians. In August 1991 after Gorbachev left to the Black Sea for a short vacation, the heads of the USSR "power ministries" (KGB chairman, armed forces chief of staff, Minister of Interior, etc. etc.) formed the "State Committee for Extrordinary Situation" ( G.K.Ch .P.) and tried to overthrow the government. ..."
"... That's what happened in Washington in 2016-2018 - "GKChP Lite." ..."
"... After the putsch attempt failed, the leaders were arrested and the power ministries reorganized - the KGB was split into several departments including the FSB and SVR for internal and external intelligence. ..."
"... Trump can declassify these personally if he wants, at any time. He could even go live on air and read portions of it to the public. He has the power, but he refuses to use it. ..."
"... Trumps entire cabinet is full of Goldman Sachs, Skull and Bones, CFR, Pentagon, CIA, Career politicians... at what point do you realize he was never going to drain the swamp? Both candidates are a joke and so is this website for becoming a Big R Republican website. ..."
"... This is all kabuki theater because Trump could have signed an Executive Order releasing everything back to JFK 3 years ago instead of flapping his yap. Comey has a Hollywood movie coming out this fall, As Biden said, "Shut up, man". ..."
"... No one is going to prison that deserves to over this. They'll crucify some desk monkey or intern, pat each other on the back and brag about a job well done. We've seen it the last four years, some low level schmuck changes the footer on some emails and the DOJ is all over it like white on rice. Totally ignoring the fact there is a seditionist movement, maybe even treasonous, happening at a systemic level throughout government. Four years is enough time to build a case, lord knows any one with half a mind can find all the evidence needed in four damned days. ..."
"... The a-holes running the DOJ won't prosecute Comey, or Clinton, or Brennan or any other name we know. Because they're doing dirty deeds themselves and don't want to set the precedent in fear those who come after them might in turn prosecute them ..."
"Federalist" co-founder Sean Davis reports that CIA Director Gina Haspel is personally
blocking the release of documents that will show "what actually happened" with Russiagate.
" This isn't just a scandal about Democrat projection, this is a scandal about what was a
coup planned against the incoming administration at the highest levels and I can report here
tonight that these declassifications that have come out," Davis told FOX News host Tucker
Carlson on Wednesday. "Those weren't easy to get out and there are far more waiting to get
out."
"Unfortunately those releases and declassifications according to multiple sources I've
talked to are being blocked by CIA director Gina Haspel who herself was the main link between
Washington and London ," Davis said.
"As the London station chief from John Brennan's CIA during the 2016 election. Recall, it
was London where Christopher Steele was doing all this work. And I'm told that it was Gina
Haspel personally who is blocking a continued declassification of these documents that will
show the American people the truth of what actually happened."
Watch:
pier , 1 hour ago
The REASON they won't release them: The TRUMP Collusion wasn't with the Russians , but with APARTHEID Isra-h-e-l-l. But NO ONE will investigate that. M.A.G.A. is out.
M.I.G.A is in.
Joseph Sullivan , 1 hour ago
No. This is all the UK. And Brit east India/pharma complex I'm serious. Israel is a UK proxy.
tion , 1 hour ago
True. 'Bloody Gina' is Trump's loyalist appointee, following through on what loyalist
Pompeo started to protect Trump Crime Family Corruption, Chabad Mafia, and ZOG.
My last
comment including my sentiments towards Gina got eaten by censorship for reasons obvious to
me, but please allow me to still congratulate Gina on reducing the almighty Third Option into
the Toiletpaper Option.
acetrumchura , 1 hour ago
2018, BREAKING: Trump appoints Haspel as first female CIA director
acetrumchura , 1 hour ago
2017: Breaking: CIA Director Mike Pompeo appoints Haspel as the first female CIA officer
to be named deputy director.
BGen. Jack Ripper , 49 minutes ago
Fathead and Esper were best buds at West Point..
NoWorries77 , 1 hour ago
Evidence destruction was one the main purposes of the Mueller "investigation".
realitybiter , 2 hours ago
Trump Has played like Tom Brady. Without either guard or tackle. Take the CIA and the FBI. They are both still ran by rats. Tree of liberty is VERY thirsty.
eatapeach , 1 hour ago
Please. If you can see what Trump has done, basically bending the US and its taxpayers
over for Israel, you'd realize he's just another in a long line of AIPAC Presidents. Ain't
nobody opposing him. CIA knows what Russia knows about him, and they're just using him as
bait.
GreatUncle , 57 minutes ago
Either they are accountable or they are treasonous. CIA is the globalist intelligence agency now.
MAGAMAN , 2 hours ago
It will happen, the fuse just keeps getting shorter. Nobody even refutes that Obama is a
traitor that spied on Trump's campaign and tried to overthrow the President. The evidence is
overwhelming and continues to snow ball.
ChiangMaiXPat , 1 hour ago
It will never happen as Trump appointed these Clowns. Imagine appointing people working
DIRECTLY against your self interest. Does this sound logical or even remotely plausible? I
don't recall it EVER happening in any other administration.
spqrusa , 2 minutes ago
He cannot do anything without Consent from the Privy Council and the circle of demons.
ThaBigPerm , 2 hours ago
Aaaand Trump can just order declassification over "her" head. Do it.
Lather Rinse Repeat , 1 hour ago
Surfaces the cabal's foot soldiers. CIA Director Haspel was a great leader when appointed. But when process drives Haspel to
block an action, the message is that Haspel is rot and so is Haspel's network. These networks run deep and wide and prosecuting 1 or 10 does nothing - you need them all,
or the problem comes back in 5 years.
Lokiban , 2 hours ago
He won't
proof is in the pudding, Hillary still walks free, none of the corrupt ones are in jail
and won't ever go to jail. Face it, Biff has many fooled.
spam filter , 2 hours ago
The way he's constantly saying, "someone should do something about this" ...Tells my
spidey sense that he has little power in the swamp.
Propaganda Phil , 2 hours ago
Isn't she the same chick who destroyed all the torture tapes? Good luck.
Mr. Bones , 1 hour ago
All power of classification is derived from the office of the executive.
He could do exactly this, unilaterally.
Farmer Tink , 1 hour ago
First, normal people who consume news from the networks, particularly those that get their
news from MSNBC and social media, would never hear this. Second, if they did find out about
this, they'd never believe it. It would cause too much cognitive dissonance for them to
believe.
They wouldn't believe it unless the four legacy broadcast media told them so. They
just live in a land of Orange Man Bad as far as news go. A plot to overthrow the US
government by Obama and the Brits would be unfathomable to them.
Someone Else , 2 hours ago
Trump had an abrasive demeanor during the debate and in general.
How could he not, when truly everybody for four years HAS fought him tooth and nail? Few
would have had the ability to stand up to what he has stood up to.
Quia Possum , 1 hour ago
He had that demeanor before he was president too, so I don't accept that excuse.
desertboy , 27 minutes ago
U.S. Navy Reserve Doctor on Gina Haspel Torture Victim: "One of the Most Severely
Traumatized Individuals I Have Ever Seen"
justyouwait , 2 hours ago
All this crap needs to come out. Any date for the release before the election will have
the Dems and their media lap dogs crying foul. It just doesn't matter. They will NEVER
support the release of any documents that are damming to them. He should release it all right
up to the day of the election. This country needs to know all the criminality that went down.
That goes for the so called Durham report too, of which there have been so many rumors. That
one is likely to be a huge zero though by the time Barr gets done with it and then tells us
there were "improprieties" but nothing really bad. What a joke.
What bothers me more is how deep the Deep State goes in Washington. They totally control
the government and without mass firings it is impossible to even make a dent in it. This
country is gone and just doesn't know it yet. Once Kamala is crowned as queen reality will
come slamming home pdq. By the time the country realizes what has happened to them it will be
way too late, no matter how many guns they have at home. Once they cut off access to your
money, very few people will be independent enough to survive on their own.
John Couger , 2 hours ago
Trump has opened the eyes of more Americans to the simple fact that an unelected
bureaucracy is running the country
Sigh. , 2 hours ago
DJT hired this c8nt, sure, but the pool of candidates equipped to take over the CIA is
very small, and all are career swamp things. If DJT put in a true outsider, the ranks would
close and the "Director" would know nothing, could do nothing, and nothing would change. The
ranks would just wait for another President. Trump is powerless over the CIA. After all, they
could easily have him 'accidentally' killed; they've done it before.
The CIA just needs to be dissolved in acid. The political, psychological and historical
deep-rooted corruption isn't fixable by anyone.
Mclovin , 1 hour ago
McConnell would never confirm a "true outsider". Mitch is the real problem here, he tells
Trump who he will and will not confirm, so Trump has to accept one of Mitch's choices.
gcjohns1971 , 1 hour ago
He could put in Mike Flynn. And any vested employee who "closed ranks" would go on immediate and permanent
furlough.
There are only a couple or three thousand CIA agents and analysts. The rest are
contractors.
To bypass the swamp things you sideline them and put your own people in charge of the
contracts.
otschelnik , 1 hour ago
Here's something we Americans can learn from the Russians. In August 1991 after Gorbachev
left to the Black Sea for a short vacation, the heads of the USSR "power ministries" (KGB
chairman, armed forces chief of staff, Minister of Interior, etc. etc.) formed the "State
Committee for Extrordinary Situation" ( G.K.Ch
.P.) and tried to overthrow the government.
That's what happened in Washington in 2016-2018 - "GKChP Lite."
After the putsch attempt failed, the leaders were arrested and the power ministries
reorganized - the KGB was split into several departments including the FSB and SVR for
internal and external intelligence.
Trump has to do the same thing - break them up.
Occams_Razor_Trader , 1 hour ago
Kennedy wasn't a big fan................. look where it got him......................
Back and to the left.................................
LostinRMH , 2 hours ago
Trump can declassify these personally if he wants, at any time. He could even go live on
air and read portions of it to the public. He has the power, but he refuses to use it.
LostinRMH , 2 hours ago
The only timing Trump is interested in is running out the clock. If he get's a second term, a lot of these current issues will magically vanish, and new
ones will appear. This is just a scripted political show for the sheeple. It's all fake.
Oldwood , 2 hours ago
The swamp owns the government's employment agency. All hires come from within the swamp.
LooseLee , 1 hour ago
Sorry Old Man. Trump could have handled this sooooo much better and differently. I call
BS.
knightowl77 , 50 minutes ago
Here is the "B.S."
80 to 90% of the Federal Government are swamp creatures or friendly to the swamp...90 out
of 100 U.S. Senators are either swamp members or at least friendly to the swamp....Trump can
only get people confirmed to certain agencies who are Not hostile to the swamp...McConnell
and company are blocking the draining....The Dems would be even worse or just impeach
Trump....
No One else has even tried...I doubt anyone else could've survived the swamp as long as
Trump has....So you tell us HOW he could have done it better and differently?????????
AlexTheCat3741 , 1 hour ago
Not one person who has had a prior association with John Brennan should be doing anything
in the Trump Administration. And if that person cannot be fired, then reassign them to
cleaning toilets or picking up trash.
WHERE IS PRESIDENT TRUMP GETTING HIS PERSONNEL CHOICES FROM? We know Chris Cristie was one
who recommended director of the "Fibbers Bureau of Insurrection", Chris Wray and he is an
absolute disaster AND NEARLY AS BAD AS JAMES COMEY WHO MUST BE SUFFERING FROM DEMENTIA TOO AS
HE CANNOT SEEM TO REMEMBER ANYTHING WHILE UNDER OATH BEFORE A SENATE COMMITTEE.
And now we have this Gina Haspel running the CIA? ARE YOU F CKING KIDDING??
The first person to next get the ax in the Trump Administration is whoever it is that is
giving him these personnel choices, e.g., Rex Tillerson, James Matis, John Kelly, Kirsten
Nielson, Mark Esper, Mark Miley..........WHO IS PICKING THIS TRASH WHEN THE PRESIDENT NEEDS
REAL HELP PERFORMING A COLON FLUSH ON THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO GET THE GARBAGE OUT AND TO
UNDO THE DAMAGE DONE BY 8 YEARS OF BARACK O'DINGLEBARRY AND SLOW JOE BIDEN??
Citi The Real , 1 hour ago
Trumps entire cabinet is full of Goldman Sachs, Skull and Bones, CFR, Pentagon, CIA,
Career politicians... at what point do you realize he was never going to drain the swamp?
Both candidates are a joke and so is this website for becoming a Big R Republican
website.
DeeDeeTwo , 1 hour ago
This is all kabuki theater because Trump could have signed an Executive Order releasing
everything back to JFK 3 years ago instead of flapping his yap. Comey has a Hollywood movie
coming out this fall, As Biden said, "Shut up, man".
Alfred , 2 hours ago
The Director of the CIA is a cabinet position. If she doesn't want to take direction from POTUS, she should be fired.
Wild Bill Steamcock , 53 minutes ago
Yeah, there's a reason she's blocking it. If those papers are released, it'll lead to
someone high up the food chain facing a courtroom out of necessity because people will lose
their goddamed ****.
Once that happens, you'll by necessity have to go after six more. Then six more. Then
everyone in D.C., their families, friends, and pet dogs are gonna be locked up.
They protect themselves. "Obeyance of the law is for thee, not for me."
Wild Bill Steamcock , 41 minutes ago
No one is going to prison that deserves to over this. They'll crucify some desk monkey or
intern, pat each other on the back and brag about a job well done. We've seen it the last
four years, some low level schmuck changes the footer on some emails and the DOJ is all over
it like white on rice. Totally ignoring the fact there is a seditionist movement, maybe even
treasonous, happening at a systemic level throughout government. Four years is enough time to
build a case, lord knows any one with half a mind can find all the evidence needed in four
damned days.
The a-holes running the DOJ won't prosecute Comey, or Clinton, or Brennan or any other
name we know. Because they're doing dirty deeds themselves and don't want to set the
precedent in fear those who come after them might in turn prosecute them
radical-extremist , 1 hour ago
Be aware CIA people stick together like glue. They're more loyal to each other than they
are the US or any president. Once you're in the CLUB, you're in the CLUB for life. Trump was
absolutely right about not trusting "our intelligence agencies".
12Doberman , 1 hour ago
I hate the CIA...and it's been a power unto itself for a very long time. The idea that it
is under civilian oversight is a joke.
Max21c , 1 hour ago
the CIA...and it's been a power unto itself for a very long time. The idea that it is
under civilian oversight is a joke.
Quite true there is no oversight and the secret police community and intelligence
community are presently and have been for a long time above the law, above the Constitution,
above the very framework of government per above Congress & above the President and above
the Courts... and everybody just goes along with the pack of criminals in the security state
and accepts that they have the right to commit crimes, run criminal activities, and abuse
secret police powers... and nobody ever stands up to the Nazis and NeoNazis and these
radicals in the military secret police, military intelligence, Pentagon Gestapo, National
Security Council, FBI & CIA and the rest of the criminal underworld network inside and
around the organized criminal enterprises and organized criminal networks of the security
state...
12Doberman , 1 hour ago
That's right and the civilian government is largely just a facade.
ken , 1 hour ago
CIA wasn't W-A-S for preventing 9/11...or were they involved in it? Did the missing
trillions go to Israel, and that other country, as payment for services???
_arrow
protrumpusa , 2 hours ago
Someone asked in previous post - why do democrats hate Trump? Good question.
It can't be his policies - who except illegals don't want secure borders, who doesn't want a
strong private buisiness economy, who doesn't want manufacturing jobs to be brought back from
China.
Our democrat leaders, plus Romney all have a connection to Ukraine's stolen treasury money
and Soros's money too, and Trump doesn't . This I believe is the reason democrats hate
President Trump
protrumpusa , 2 hours ago
The Obama administration and the FBI knew that it was they who were meddling in a
presidential campaign - using executive intelligence powers to monitor the president's
political opposition. This, they also knew, would rightly be regarded as a scandalous abuse
of power if it ever became public. There was no rational or good-faith evidentiary basis to
believe that Trump was in a criminal conspiracy with the Kremlin or that he'd had any role in
Russian intelligence's suspected hacking of Democratic Party email accounts.
[snip]
In the stretch run of the 2016 campaign, President Obama authorized his administration's
investigative agencies to monitor his party's opponent in the presidential election, on the
pretext that Donald Trump was a clandestine agent of Russia. Realizing this was a gravely
serious allegation for which there was laughably insufficient predication, administration
officials kept Trump's name off the investigative files. That way, they could deny that they
were doing what they did. Then they did it . . . and denied it.
LEEPERMAX , 30 minutes ago
Gina Haspel worked directly for the instigator of the Crossfire Hurricane operation
– John Brennan. It would have been impossible for Haspel not to have known about the
British spying from London since it was reported in UK newspaper on a weekly basis.
She certainly was controlling Stefan
Halper , Josef
Mifsud ,
Stephan Roh , Alexander Downer, Andrew Wood, John McCain, Mark Warner, Adam Schiff and
the other conspirators.
Kan , 2 hours ago
The FBI and CIA are the enemy of the people. There is little doubt at this point that they
serve nobody but the bankers that formed the organization and themselves.
Gunston_Nutbush_Hall , 2 hours ago
How convenient.
CIA operative Trump nominates Haspel to be the CIA director, after CIA Operative Trump
picked CIA chief Mike Pompeo to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, thereafter
Epstein is Trumpincided on CIA Operatives Barr Pompeo Trump's watch, while running smoke
cover for the CIA's Obama's False Flag National Government.
Shortly after taking office in 1999, Jesse Ventura writes he was asked to attend a meeting
at the state Capitol. He says 23 CIA agents were waiting for him in a basement conference
room.
The greatest False Flag ever? Brainwashing Americans to think Constitutional Federal
Government exists.
Kefeer , 17 minutes ago
The people who want to know and care to know the truth already know the truth. It is
suspect that Trump appoints people like Christopher Wray and Gina Haspel and I really do not
know what to make of it - is he part of the swamp or making bad decisions? I honestly do not
know, but my biblical lens filter tells me we are in trouble regardless of the outcomes
because so many of the institutions in government and industry are so corrupt.
Maltheus , 29 minutes ago
Trump is absolutely incompetent, when it comes to selecting people. He always has been.
Flynn was one of the few, who was halfway decent, and he got thrown to the wolves. Pretty
much everyone else, he's ever chosen, has knifed him in the back, and most of us saw it
coming a mile away.
Tuffmug , 13 minutes ago
The Swamp is deep and has had twenty + years to grow . Trump had to chose the ones who
stunk least from a slimy pool of corrupted officials and fight against every agency, each
filled with deep state snakes. I'm just surprised he is still breathing.
Kinskian , 29 seconds ago
So his incompetence begins and ends with "selecting people" and that gets no downvotes
from the 'tards. I understand why. You're still blaming other people for Trump's failures in
office instead of placing the blame squarely with HIM. He is incompetent in his role as
President, and that is his responsibility.
LEEPERMAX , 36 minutes ago
Gina Haspel would have known about the coup. If she has not reported all of this to the
President Trump, she is complicit in the overthrow attempt and is guilty of HIGH TREASON.
Wild Bill Steamcock , 49 minutes ago
Spooks run this world. And they certainly like power, and money. But do you want to know
what they like most of all?
Information.
Control of information drives everything else. And anyone who has even sniffed that world
knows to get quality information you can't buy it. Instead you have to trade information of
equal value.
We're not important enough to have the opportunity to know what they know. I don't know
about you, but I'm a little angry about that.
StealthBomber , 30 minutes ago
That is because they are un-accountable.
Wild Bill Steamcock , 30 minutes ago
and untouchable.
Take one out and the whole thing collapses.
insanelysane , 51 minutes ago
Don't think we need declassifications to know what happened. We know what
happened.
as I've stated many times, governments would be completely unstable if the government
legally proved that organizations within the government were involved is sedition. With the
IRS scandal the deflection was that a few rogue employees did some things even though the
entire IRS was involved in harassing far right and far left organizations.
The problem with Russiagate is that none of the rogue employees are willing to to go down
without taking everyone involved down. The IRS rogues got nice payouts and no prison
time.
radical-extremist , 1 hour ago
She doesn't want them released because obviously it implicates her in Strzok's Crossfire
Hurricane scheme. It also puts mud on the face of MI6, which is why Trump might be
hesitant.
October is young.
12Doberman , 1 hour ago
Haspel is also likely a figurehead in many respects. From what I've read about CIA over
the years those at the top have competing agendas and don't trust and share information with
each other. The idea that a president is sworn in ever 4-8 years and is brought up to speed
on everything they are doing is laughable...and likely impossible. No president fully
controls the CIA and it has it's own agenda that runs across and through
administrations...may as well call it the head of the deep state snake.
Felix da Kat , 2 hours ago
Haspel is a Brennan redux.
The deep state is much deeper than anyone dare thought.
If Trump cannot do unwind the DS,then all is lost.
If Biden gets in, he will only serve to further entrench DS operatives.
Looking bleak out there, folks.
1nd1v1s1ble1 , 3 hours ago
*sigh* As if anything is going to come of this...when has any high ranking politician EVER
been taken to task or incarcerated for their crimes? It's the same political theater brought
to you by the MSM/Jesuit/Jooish/Freemason cult who ritually perform their televised 'skits'
to the masses to make it appear as if justice exists or better yet, we have a Republic-
newsflash: it died a long, long time ago. The frightened mask-wearing, compliant sheeple lap
it up every f'n time-when do you awake and realize there is no bi-partisan political machine,
there is no blue versus red, just like their cronies in Hollyweird, these politicians are
simply actors who were too ugly to make it there, orange man aint gonna save ya, bumbling joe
aint gonna save ya, understand Stockholm Syndrome-survivors of 'merica....they DO NOT GIVE A
F#*K ABOUT YOU OR YOUR FAMILY and would prefer you were dead.
Even the POTUS cannot do anything in DC alone, no matter what he wants to do. He needs
people to cooperate or follow orders. It seems many or most of the people around him are deep
state spies. I think they are scared ****less of what Trump might try to declassify. I think
the CIA would destroy evidence before providing proof of a seditious coup. If you've
committed murder or treason, destroying evidence seems like jaywalking.
Now we know Haspel is personally involved and we probably know exactly why she is blocking
the release of this information.
Jack_Ewing , 17 minutes ago
Trump was supposed to drain the swamp but surrounded himself with the scariest of swamp
creatures, this Medusa-like entity being one of the most terrifying. Pompeo, Mnuchin, Wray,
Miller, Haspel, Kushner, and the chief of the all, the official cover-upper for the Deep
State for the last 40 years, William Barr.
donkey_shot , 45 minutes ago
surprise, surprise: one-time iraqi detainee torturer and current CIA chief gina haspel is
a nasty piece of work: geez, whodathunk?
The only reason I can think of for holding these documents is that the conspiracy is so
vast and intricate, it might destroy 80 plus percent of the government! If that's what it
comes down to, so be it! Blow the whole PHUCKING thing to kingdom come!
Philthy_Stacker , 45 minutes ago
An accurite assumption.
LOL123 , 1 hour ago
Gina Haspel doesn't have a legal leg to stand on.
"The most explosive revelation was that the dossier was
bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee , a
fact that the Clinton campaign took pains to hide, that Clinton officials lied about, and
that Fusion GPS refused to reveal on its own. It wasn't an intelligence report at all. It was
a political hit job paid for by Trump's opponent."
Political issues " incorporated" into public stock holding corporations.
"Individual shareholders cannot generally sue over the deprivation of a corporation's
rights; only the board of directors has the standing to assert a corporation's constitutional
rights in court. [7]
-USA
Ever since Citizens United, the Supreme Court's 2010 decision allowing unlimited
corporate and union spending on political issues, Americans have been debating whether, as
Mitt Romney said, "Corporations are people, my friend."
The question came to the Supreme Court in a challenge to regulations implementing
President Obama's landmark health care law. Those regulations require employers with 50 or
more employees to provide those employees with comprehensive health insurance, which must
include certain forms of contraception. The contraception requirement was designed to protect
the rights of women. Studies show that access to
contraception has positive benefits for women's education, income, mental health, and family
stability.
since a political entity ( DNC and Hillary Campaign funded a public corporation which
is a " corporate personhood" and can be sued it is open to discovery in a court of
law.
the chickens have come home to roost....as Mitt Romney says....corporations are the
citizens "best friend".
R.G. , 1 hour ago
Citizens ARE corporaions.
4Y_LURKER , 1 hour ago
Finkel is Einhorn!
Einhorn is Finkel!
Totally_Disillusioned , 1 hour ago
If Sean Davis was able to unearth this, President Trump, Pompeo have known this for some
time and Ratcliffe certainly knows this. the question is "why is she allowed to block
disclosure?". None of the players are currently in service and would not be at risk if their
involvement was disclosed. What possibly is the excuse? Are they using the old excuse of not
revealing sources and methods?
All these people need a stern reminder the govt is owned by the people...they work for us.
So far we are the only people kept in the dark. Breakup the intel 17 agencies and re-engineer
down to two - one domestic and one international.
SirBarksAlot , 1 hour ago
It's always a national security issue when it's your responsibility to release the
documents that would incriminate you.
Gunston_Nutbush_Hall , 3 hours ago
Exactly why CIA Trump hand selected her. Exactly for the same reason CIA Trump hand
selected BARR.
TO PROVIDE CLEAN SMOKE N COVER FOR THEIR CIA NATIONAL GOVERNMENT.
Barr: CIA operative
It is a sobering fact that American presidents (many of whom have been corrupt) have gone
out of their way to hire fixers to be their attorney generals.
Consider recent history: Loretta Lynch (2015-2017), Eric Holder (2009-2015), Michael
Mukasey (2007-2009), Alberto Gonzales (2005-2007), John Ashcroft (2001-2005),Janet Reno
(1993-2001), **** Thornburgh (1988-1991), Ed Meese (1985-1988), etc.
Barr was a full-time CIA operative, recruited by Langley out of high school, starting
in 1971. Barr's youth career goal was to head the CIA.
CIA operative assigned to the China directorate, where he became close to powerful CIA
operative George H.W. Bush, whose accomplishments already included the CIA/Cuba Bay of
Pigs, Asia CIA operations (Vietnam War, Golden Triangle narcotics), Nixon foreign policy
(Henry Kissinger), and the Watergate operation.
When George H.W. Bush became CIA Director in 1976, Barr joined the CIA's "legal office"
and Bush's inner circle, and worked alongside Bush's longtime CIA enforcers Theodore "Ted"
Shackley, Felix Rodriguez, Thomas Clines, and others, several of whom were likely involved
with the Bay of Pigs/John F. Kennedy assassination, and numerous southeast Asian
operations, from the Phoenix Program to Golden Triangle narco-trafficking.
Barr stonewalled and destroyed the Church Committee investigations into CIA
abuses.
Barr stonewalled and stopped inquiries in the CIA bombing assassination of Chilean
opposition leader Orlando Letelier.
Barr joined George H.W. Bush's legal/intelligence team during Bush's vice presidency
(under President Ronald Reagan) Rose from assistant attorney general to Chief Legal Counsel
to attorney general (1991) during the Bush 41 presidency.
Barr was a key player in the Iran-Contra operation, if not the most important member of
the apparatus, simultaneously managing the operation while also "fixing" the legal end,
ensuring that all of the operatives could do their jobs without fear of exposure or
arrest.
In his attorney general confirmation, Barr vowed to "attack criminal organizations",
drug smugglers and money launderers. It was all hot air: as AG, Barr would preserve,
protect, cover up, and nurture the apparatus that he helped create, and use Justice
Department power to escape punishment.
Barr stonewalled and stopped investigations into all Bush/Clinton and CIA crimes,
including BCCI and BNL CIA drug banking, the theft of Inslaw/PROMIS software, and all
crimes of state committed by Bush
Barr provided legal cover for Bush's illegal foreign policy and war crimes
Barr left Washington, and went through the "rotating door" to the corporate world,
where he took on numerous directorships and counsel positions for major companies. In 2007
and again from 2017, Barr was counsel for politically-connected international law firm
Kirkland &
Ellis . Among its other notable attorneys and alumni are Kenneth Starr, John Bolton,
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and numerous Trump administration attorneys.
K&E's clients include sex trafficker/pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and Mitt Romney's Bain
Capital.
A strong case can be made that William Barr was as powerful and important a figure in the
Bush apparatus as any other, besides Poppy Bush himself.
...Shortly after taking office in 1999, Jesse Ventura writes he was asked to attend a
meeting at the state Capitol. He says 23 CIA agents were waiting for him in a basement
conference room.
Bobby Farrell Can Dance , 3 hours ago
The Navalny "incident" is the latest pathetic CIA and British MI6 operation and the
Belarus incitement. Sloppy, unoriginal and going to backfire in their stupid faces.
Everybody knows the evil empire wants Nordstream II dead, Navalny is the latest lever and
that woman they recognized as leader of Belarus is as laughable as that Guaido goon they
recognized in Venezuela, but he's actually outside of Venezuela - yeah that's how popular he
is. Western intelligence agenices are hacks, they are past their peak.
John Hansen , 3 hours ago
The real stupid thing is the West will succeed.
Spinifex , 20 minutes ago
Christopher Steele is THE GUY who 'doctored all this up'. Why has he not been bought
before congress and asked questions?
Sergi Scripal worked for Christopher Steele. Sergi Scripal earned tens of thousands of
pounds 'providing information' to Christopher Steele. Why is he 'not being asked questions?
He's not 'dead'. Sergi Scripal is 'alive and well' and 'being hidden' by the U.K. Government
'for his own safty.' The U.K. can provide 'access to Sergi Scripal.
Pablo Miller worked for Christopher Steele. Pablo Miller was Sergi Scripals 'handler' with
MI6. Pablo Miller was also the 'last person to talk to Sergi Scripal' before Sergi Scripal
'surccumed to Novichok poison.' Why is Pablo Miller (aka: Antonio Alvarez de Hidalgo -
https://gosint.wordpress.com/2019/02/02/who-is-mi6-officer-pablo-miller/
All three worked for Orbis Business Intelligence the company that wrote the 'Steele
Dossier' that Gina Haspel had access to and 'approved' sending onto the FBI and CIA. All
three, Christopher Steele, Sergi Scripal and Pablo Miller are 'alive and well' and all three
are able to provide information about the Steele Dossier, what was in the Steele Dossier, and
WHERE the information in the Steele Dossier came from. Ask the questions dammit, and you'll
get the answers.
headless blogger , 58 minutes ago
Not a fan of Trump, although I voted for him the first time, but he will be in serious
trouble if Biden gets into office as there are too many vengeful people on that side of the
isle. They attempted a coup d'etat which is the worse treason, where most of these people
would be executed in "normal" times.
So, they HAVE TO win at all costs, in their thinking. They will then turn the tables on
Trump as well as the entire Conservative camp. It looks like an ugly future if they win. If
Trump wins, it will be ugly too.
Sure signs to get the hell out now if you can.
The Technocracy crowd is behind all of this, btw. They are waiting for the full collapse
at which time we will be inundated with Tech Billionaires coming forward to "save us".
BEWARE!!
4 play_arrow 1
1nd1v1s1ble1 , 1 hour ago
*sigh* As if anything is going to come of this...when has any high ranking politician EVER
been taken to task or incarcerated for their crimes? It's the same political theater brought
to you by the MSM/Jesuit/Jooish/Freemason Satanic cult who ritually perform their televised
'skits' to the masses to make it appear as if justice exists or better yet, we have a
Republic- newsflash: it died a long, long time ago. The frightened mask-wearing, compliant
sheeple lap it up every f'n time-when do you awake and realize there is no bi-partisan
political machine? There is no blue versus red, just like their cronies in Hollyweird, these
colluding politicians are simply actors who were too ugly to make it there, orange man aint
gonna save ya, bumbling joe aint gonna save ya, understand Stockholm Syndrome-survivors of
'merica....they DO NOT GIVE A F#*K ABOUT YOU OR YOUR FAMILY and would actually prefer you
were dead.
Better/cheaper than sending US military to fight in another useless war.
headless blogger , 1 hour ago
Gina Haspel was selected by Trump!! When you take into consideration Trump's selections of
Haspel, Bolton, and many others, it becomes obvious there is someone in his admin that is
directing him to bring these people on. He brings them on and then they betray him.
5onIt , 1 hour ago
Pence is the dude you are looking for.
Haspel was the CIA Station Chief in London, when this was all going down.
Be sure, she has chit to hide.
LEEPERMAX , 1 hour ago
John Brennan led the coup this side of the Atlantic, while Gina Haspel , who was in the
CIA London office at the time, worked the coup from London as the CIA chief in cooperation
with GCHQ and Robert Hannigan. Both are creepy, corrupt traitors of America.
The current head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gina Haspel, oversaw one such site
where torture was carried out. ... Abu Zubaydah, Courtesy Professor Mark P. Denbeaux, Seton
Hall University ...
y_arrow
Mister Delicious , 2 hours ago
She was Brennan's London pet.
She should be fired and escorted from the building, and then DOJ NSD should open an
investigation into her contacts with Brennan.
Think there might be a Demstate coup attempt?
Well, don't you imagine any friend of John Brennan's is not a friend of Trump.
I don't care how much you love Orange Jesus - he has picked absolutely terrible people
over and over and over.
Good DNI now but he needs to take charge.
richsob , 3 hours ago
Orange Fat Boy is getting played like a violin. You and I both know it. Does he? Probably
because you can see it on his face but he's just not willing to do what it would take to get
everything out into the open. And if he tries to expose everything after he's lost the
election nobody will listen to him......even you and I. It will be too late then.
We would think that the New York Slimes would know something about losses. After all, they
paid $1.1 Billion in 1993 for The Boston Globe and in 2013, sold it for $70 Million to
businessman John Henry, the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, and a massive 93%
loss.
But it's worse than that because included in that sale is BostonGlobe.com ; Boston.com ; the direct-mail marketing company Globe Direct; the
company's 49 percent interest in Metro Boston, a free daily paper; Telegram.com and The Worcester Telegram & Gazette. The Times
bought the Telegram & Gazette for $295 million in 1999.
We should be convinced to pay any attention to Fake News Tabloid, The New York Slimes,
given that kind of Business Acumen? I don't think so.
rwe2late , 3 hours ago
Hope & Change, Drain the swamp, End the wars
Angelic Obama allegedly prevented from saving us by "deep state" Republicans.
Angelic Trump allegedly prevented from saving us by "deep state" Democrats.
Poor us, our chosen leaders and parties are always so blameless in failing us.
protrumpusa , 4 hours ago
President Trump has gotten rid just about everyone in this article I found 3 years ago
> The ATLANTIC COUNCIL is funded by BURISMA, GEORGE SOROS OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATION &
others. It was a CENTRIST, MILITARISTIC think tanks,now turned leftist group
> JOE BIDEN extorted Ukraine to FIRE the prosecutor investigating BURISMA, HUNTER's
employer.
> LTC VINDMAN & FIONA HILL met MANY TIMES with DANIEL FRIED of the ATLANTIC
COUNCIL. FIONA HILL is a former CoWorker of CHRISTOPHER STEELE !
> AMBASSADOR YOVANOVITCH is connected to the ATLANTIC COUNCIL, is PRAISED in their
documents, gave Ukraine a "do not prosecute" list, was involved in PRESSURING Ukraine to not
prosecute GEORGE SOROS Group.
> BILL TAYLOR has a financial relationship with the ATLANTIC COUNCIL and the US UKRAINE
BUSINESS COUNCIL (USUBC) which is also funded by BURISMA.
> TAYLOR met with THOMAS EAGER (works for ADAM SCHIFF) in Ukraine on trip PAID FOR by
the ATLANTIC COUNCIL. This just days before TAYLOR first texts about the "FAKE" Quid Pro Quo
!
> TAYLOR participated in USUBC Events with DAVID J. KRAMER (JOHN MCCAIN advisor) who
spread the STEELE DOSSIER to the media and OBAMA officials.
> JOE BIDEN is connected to the ATLANTIC COUNCIL, he rolled out his foreign policy
vision while VP there, He has given speeches there, his adviser on Ukraine, MICHAEL CARPENTER
(heads the Penn Biden Center) is a FELLOW at the ATLANTIC COUNCIL.
> KURT VOLKER is now Senior Advisor to the ATLANTIC COUNCIL, he met with burisma
But at 1000 I dutifully tuned my "record player" (joe reference) to CSPAN-3. Comey claims
that he knew little of "Crossfire Hurricane," the FBI run clandestine campaign against Trump
and all his vassals and works. This, in spite of his having been Director of the FBI while it
was carried out. "I knew nussing, nussing" was his basic response to just about every question.
Graham, the chairman of the judiciary committee got lathered up about that and laughed at the
idea, laughed openly. He and Comey used to be pals.
President Trump took to the debate stage tonight shortly after Tucker Carlson aired and it
seemed like he was on the right track with his feisty hits on Joe Biden and plan to help all
Americans by rebuilding the economy. Pedro Gonzalez, a popular guest of top-rated Tucker
Carlson's show spoke to Tucker about why more Hispanics may be supporting President Trump.
Here's a clue, it's not by pandering. It's by showing the American people that he is a strong,
alpha leader.
It's by not treating Hispanics as though they need to be put on some higher playing field
than White Americans to show them they matter. They already know they matter, they just want to
know what President Trump is going to do to make America a safer country for business owners
and law-abiding citizens who don't care to be known by their race, to begin with.
"People who work for a living don't like disorder because they're vulnerable to it". "You're
right," Pedro says. "The GOP is starting to recycle these talking points while denigrating
their white base they patronize Latinos by saying things like, one group of people does the job
that another group doesn't want to do, it's not just untrue, it's morally repugnant," he says.
Gonzales goes on to say that the GOP should stop trying to beat the Democrats at their own
game. He says Trump should play his own game because "he's good at it and it's more popular"
and he goes on to describe his thoughts more below.
Perhaps President Trump should start listening to the organic voices from the right and stop
listening to paid bureaucrats who are out of touch with reality going into the election as he
faces a more challenging demographic voter situation than any Republican presidential candidate
ever.
No one claims to be an isolationist, but foreign policy analysts keep imagining and fearing
a "resurgence" of isolationism around every corner. This fear was on display in a recent
Atlanticarticle
by Charles Kupchan, who tries to rehabilitate the label in order to oppose the substance of a
policy of nonintervention and non-entanglement. Kupchan allows that a policy of avoiding
entangling alliances and staying out of European wars was important for the growth and
prosperity of the United States, but then rehearses the same old and misleading story about the
terrible "isolationist" interwar years that we have heard countless times before. This
misrepresents the history of that period and compromises our ability to rethink our foreign
policy today.
Kupchan's article is not just an exercise in beating a dead horse, since he fears that the
same thing that happened between the world wars is happening again: "If the 19th century was
isolationism's finest hour, the interwar era was surely its darkest and most deluded. The
conditions that led to this misguided run for cover are making a comeback." Kupchan wants to
borrow a little from the people he calls "isolationists" so that the U.S. will remain
thoroughly ensnared in most of its global commitments.
At the same time that he warns that "U.S. statecraft has become divorced from popular will,"
he seems to want to keep it this way by rejecting what he calls the "isolationist temptation."
If "a majority of the country favors either America First or global disengagement," as he says,
the goal seems to be to ignore what the majority wants in favor of making a few tweaks to the
same old strategy of U.S. primacy. Those tweaks aren't going to lessen popular support for a
reduced U.S. role in the world, and they will likely make the public even more disillusioned
with the remaining costs and demands of U.S. "leadership."
The key thing to remember in all this is that the U.S. has never been isolationist in its
foreign relations. The thing that Kupchan calls America's "default setting" is not real.
Isolationism is the pejorative term that expansionists and interventionists have used over the
last century to ridicule and dismiss opposition to unnecessary wars. Isolationism as U.S.
policy in the 1920s and 1930s is a myth , and the myth is
deployed whenever there has been a serious challenge to the status quo in post-1945 U.S.
foreign policy. Bear Braumoeller summed it up very well in his article , "The
Myth of American Isolationism," this way: "the characterization of America as isolationist in
the interwar period is simply wrong." We can't learn from the past if we insist on distorting
it. As William Appleman Williams put it in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy , "It not
only deforms the history of the decade from 1919 to 1930, but it also twists the story of
American entry into World War II and warps the record of the cold war." Williams also remarked
in a note that the use of the term isolationist "has thus crippled American thought about
foreign policy for 50 years." Today we can say that it has done so for a century.
Our government eschewed permanent alliances for most of its history, and it refrained from
taking sides in the European Great Power conflicts of the nineteenth century, but it never
sought to cut itself from the world and could not have done that even if it had wished to do
so. The U.S. was a commercial republic from the start, and it cultivated economic and
diplomatic ties with as many states as possible. You can call the steady expansion of the U.S.
across North America and into the Pacific and Caribbean "isolationism," but that just shows how
misleading and inaccurate the label has always been.
Post-WWI America was a rising power and increasingly involved in the affairs of the world.
Its economic and diplomatic engagement with the world increased during these years. If it
wasn't involved in the way that later internationalists would have liked, that didn't make the
U.S. isolationist. Braumoeller makes this point explicitly: "America was not isolationist in
affairs relating to international security in Europe for the bulk of the period: in fact, it
was perhaps more internationalist than it had ever been." The U.S. was behaving as a great
power, but one that strove to maintain its neutrality. That was neither deluded nor disastrous,
and we need to stop pretending that it was if we are ever going to be able to make the needed
changes to our foreign policy today.
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Kupchan acknowledges that there has to be an "adjustment" after the last several decades of
overreach, but he casts this as a way of preventing more significant retrenchment: "The
paramount question is whether that adjustment takes the form of a judicious pullback or a more
dangerous retreat." No one objects to the desire for a responsible reduction in U.S.
commitments, but one person's "judicious pullback" will often be denounced as a "dangerous
retreat" by others. Just consider how many times we have been warned about a U.S. "retreat"
from the Middle East over the last 11 years. Even now, the U.S. is still taking part in
multiple wars across the region, and the "retreat" we have been told has happened several times
never seems to take place. Warning about the perils of an "isolationist comeback" hardly makes
it more likely that these withdrawals will ever happen.
He recommends that "judicious retrenchment should entail shedding U.S. entanglements in the
periphery, not in the strategic heartlands of Europe and Asia." Certainly, any reduction in
unnecessary U.S. commitments is welcome, but a thorough rethinking of U.S. foreign policy has
to include every region. Kupchan is right to criticize slapdash, incompetent withdrawals, but
one gets the impression that he thinks there shouldn't be any withdrawals except from the
Middle East. He cites "Russian and Chinese threats" as the main reasons not to pull back at all
in Europe or Asia, but this seems like an uncritical endorsement of the status quo.
It is in East Asia where the U.S. might be fighting a war against a major, nuclear-armed
power in the future, and it is also there where the U.S. has some of the wealthiest and most
capable allies. If the U.S. can't reduce its exposure to the risk of a major war where that
risk is the greatest and its allies are strongest, when will it ever be able to do that?
Reducing the U.S. military presence in East Asia will make it easier to manage U.S.-Chinese
tensions, and it will give allies an additional incentive to assume more responsibility for
their own security.
The U.S. has far more security commitments than it can afford and far more than can possibly
be justified by our own security interests. That includes, but is not limited to, our
overcommitment to the Middle East. Our foreign entanglements have been allowed to grow and
spread to such an extent over the last seventy-five years that modest pruning won't be good
enough to put U.S. foreign policy on a sound footing that will have reliable public support.
There needs to be a much more comprehensive review of all U.S. commitments to determine which
ones are truly necessary for our security and which ones are not. Ruling out the bulk of those
commitments as untouchable in advance is a mistake.
There is
broad public support for constructive international engagement, but there is remarkably
little backing for preserving U.S. hegemony in its current form. In order to have a more
sustainable foreign policy, the U.S. needs to scale back its ambitions in most parts of the
world, and it needs to shift more of the security burdens for different regions to the
countries that have the most at stake. That should be done deliberately and carefully, but it
does need to happen if we are to realign our foreign policy with protecting the vital interests
of the United States. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC , where he also keeps a solo blog . He has been published in
the New York Times Book Review , Dallas Morning News , World Politics
Review , Politico Magazine , Orthodox Life , Front Porch Republic, The
American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week . He holds a PhD in
history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter .
Richard Hofsteder is largely responsible for this falsehood, like he is for making
"populist" a by-word, as Thomas Frank points out in his new book.
I prefer the term "non-interventionist" or Washingtonian, myself. I continue to be stuck
by the amazing wisdom of Washington's Farewell Address (largely written by Hamilton). It
really should be our guide to this day.
Try a seance and tell this Augusto Cesar Sandino. Two American brothers who owned a gold
mine in his country had another brother at the State Department. That's how FP was
"successful."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
Europe would have been better off if the US had stayed out of WWI and let major
belligerents fight it out until they reached a cease fire on their own. The US entry into the
war, tipped the scales in favor of Britain and France and resulted in a very harsh peace
treaty being imposed on Germany in 1919. Four years later, Germany's currency collapsed,
wiping out the savings of millions of average Germans. The Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 made
economic conditions for people in central Europe very bad and conrtibuted to the rising
popularity of the Nazi party in Germany.
The world is so much smaller today than it was when this country was formed and organized
by the Founding Fathers. (Mothers were not allowed)
The idea of international associations and cooperation is required with today's world.
When some country like China sneezes, the whole world needs a face mask!
The Age of Daniel Boone is dead. America must be fully engaged in world matters. That does
not mean going into every country with our military. America needs to continue to give some
leadership in world affairs. It would be suicidal to close the windows to the rest of the
world.
I agree. The world is interconnected, engagement is a necessity. The problem with the US
FP at this point is to see every issue as an opportunity to throw around our military weight
and call it "engagement". Being fully engaged in the world is a state department issue -
smart and educated diplomats working the lines of communication and cooperation with every
nation to build a reputation for US leadership, to foment peace, and to build prosperity.
Obviously, under Trump and Pompeo this is a waste of breath.
Worth noting, a friend of mine, ex-CIA, has made an absolute fortune off of our military
preoccupations. And even he said (perhaps exaggerating) that you could get rid of 90% of the
traditional military with little or no loss in actual national security. Most of it is, as he
said, corporate welfare and window dressing.
(Of course he then said you should spend what you've saved entirely on cyber-security)
Using the 'I' Word for War and Profit
Column by Tim Hartnett, posted on April 03, 2013
in War and Peace
Column by Tim Hartnett.
Exclusive to STR
For about a century now, Humpty-Dumpty has been the go-to man for fans of elaborate
American foreign adventures. Unwelcome inquiries are put down with a one word incantation
that blesses and immunizes government-funded schemes that are always cash cows for somebody.
"Isolationist" means exactly what its users mean it to mean--no more and no less. Every entry
on the first page of my online search for the word "isolationism" provided the same
definition: "The national policy of abstaining from political or economic relations with
other countries." Nobody on the furthest fringes of the political spectrum who gets ink or
air time comes close calling for a plan fitting that description.
The word remains in healthy circulation despite the total absence of public figures
advocating anything of the kind. Its real linguistic purpose is to obstruct examination of
extra-territorial programs that don't work and often do considerable harm.
Most of us first learned of the dreaded I-beast in grade school study of WWI. Back in that
good old day, the authorities had sense enough to put these naysayers in prisons after
allowing hostile crowds to have at 'em for an hour or so. If the folks at The Weekly
Standard, the Heritage Foundation, AEI, Fox News et al get their way, hoosegow entrepreneurs
will be back in that market before too long. How could anyone oppose US entry into The Great
War, anyway? It's what catapulted us to the top of the economic heap. We are probably only
one good war away from reclaiming that title.
The first people to stoke lynch mobs with the "I" word claimed we were fighting a war "to
make the world safe for democracy." The Irish, Indians, Algerians, Pacific Islanders, Russian
peasants, Filipinos, the Congolese and millions of other Africans were not educated well
enough to accept this as readily as freedom-loving Americans did. Without guys like J.P.
Morgan, J.D. Rockefeller, Charles Schwab and others who hired PR men to keep the country
thinking right thoughts, foreigners are often easily misled. Isolationists are as rare on
Wall Street as atheists are in foxholes.
To understand the perfidious way that isolationism works, try and visualize a typical
slice of American policy from say 1968. Some experts and officers in a room at the Pentagon
decide a spot on the map could use a good bombing, and the order is relayed via satellite to
South Vietnam. At five they leave work to fight rush hour traffic and get home in time for a
smoke with Walter Cronkite. Some Navy fliers get dispatched, and once the napalm is fixed to
the jets, they're airborne. Thirty-five minutes later, the right patch below them, it's bombs
away and a U-turn. An undernourished five year old girl foolishly lives nearby and an eight
ounce blob of gel burning at 1,800 degrees lands on her back. She is immediately screaming
and burns for six minutes until an adult manages to put the incinerating child out.
Meanwhile, the flyboys are on terra firma again with beers, joints, Steppenwolf on the
turntable and much lamenting of St. Louis' undeserved defeat at the hands of Detroit. The
little girl's screaming still pierces the tropical air. The engineers and the chemists who
designed the people-melting device are on the other side of the world asleep in their
suburban beds. And the tiny thing can't stop screaming. The next day at Harvard, William
Kristol is expounding on communism, the domino theory, social responsibility, moral courage
and careful reading. And the 32 lb. waif is still going through an endless agony that no man
of oxen strength should ever have to endure in a lifetime. Isolating on these kinds of
details misses the "big picture," I've been told. Only communists, terrorists and other
abominable -ists focus on this kind of inhumane minutiae.
Forty years later, John McCain was wittily singing the lyrics "bomb Iran" while doubtless
a child was on fire somewhere that US ordnance had exploded. The one certain outcome of such
events is a profit for weapons manufacturers. Isolationists are oddly skeptical of the many
benefits anti-isolationists find in all-purpose bombing campaigns. What's always clear is
that people who speak publicly about their love for humanitarian bombing expect to be paid
for it.
There are a lot of things that "isolationists" just don't know, and it must be for this
ignorance they are so despised by both mainstream media and Wall Street's favorite
politicians. They don't know why we have 50,000 soldiers in Germany or another 30,000 in
Japan. Why we paid to keep an incorrigible thug like Mubarak in business for 30 years. Why we
need missiles in Eastern Europe. Why we helped every bloodthirsty, misanthropic power monger
in Central America. Why we needed to help Turkey get Ocalan. Why South Ossetia's
nationalistic prerogatives are our business. Why foreign governments should be pressured by
our diplomats on Wall Street's behalf. Why our government takes some kind of stand in every
foreign war, election, national event or internal matter of almost any kind. How we can
indict one country for human rights violations while buddying up to worse offenders like
Saudi Arabia regularly. Why our foreign initiatives proceed based on fantastic ideologies in
contempt of facts. These are just a few of the quandaries that afflict the minds of people
who aren't buying the divine right of American altruist aristocracy to fine tune the rest of
the world. They aren't exactly keen on the hyper-interventionist tendencies that keep so many
beltway bandits in the chips, either.
What they also don't know is why the elite media, the experts and elected officials, if
they truly understand these things, can't be called upon to explain any of them to the rest
of us satisfactorily. On March 20, Dana Milbank called Rand Paul an "isolationist" in his
column without any explanation. In the future, he might want to right click on Microsoft Word
and choose the Look up option before deploying the term.
After American involvement in Vietnam ended, many proponents of the action claimed the
death toll there would have been even worse without our presence. Others go so far as to
maintain that fighting in such conflicts protects US citizens' privileges, like freedom of
speech, here at home. They expect us all to believe that "Isolationists," by any definition,
wouldn't get away with spouting their un-American propaganda in public places, or on
television if any were allowed there, but for a policy that napalms little girls.
While people smeared with the I-word persistently point out that they are merely against
policies that are misguided, immoral and often murderous, their detractors insist that what
they really oppose is America. In the "big picture" mindset of the interventionist, you can't
have one without the other.
Beat them over the head with a stick, that might do it.
As for the entanglements in east Asia, none of the countries under direct US vassalage
have major disputes with China and do not need US protection. And it is likely that without
the US Korea would be on a path to reunification. The US is trying to beat everyone in line
to show who's the boss... So it seems, this K guy, like all his ilk are presenting things in
a very Manichean way: either primacy or "isolationism". There is so much in between these
two...
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During a 33-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, I served presidents of both parties -- three Republicans and three
Democrats. I was at President George W. Bush's side when we were attacked on Sept. 11; as deputy director of the agency, I was with
President Obama when we killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.
I am neither a registered Democrat nor a registered Republican. In my 40 years of voting, I have pulled the lever for candidates
of both parties. As a government official, I have always been silent about my preference for president.
No longer. On Nov. 8, I will vote for Hillary Clinton. Between now and then, I will do everything I can to ensure that she is
elected as our 45th president.
Two strongly held beliefs have brought me to this decision. First, Mrs. Clinton is highly qualified to be commander in chief.
I trust she will deliver on the most important duty of a president -- keeping our nation safe. Second, Donald J. Trump is not only
unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security.
I spent four years working with Mrs. Clinton when she was secretary of state, most often in the White House Situation Room. In
these critically important meetings, I found her to be prepared, detail-oriented, thoughtful, inquisitive and willing to change her
mind if presented with a compelling argument.
I also saw the secretary's commitment to our nation's security; her belief that America is an exceptional nation that must lead
in the world for the country to remain secure and prosperous; her understanding that diplomacy can be effective only if the country
is perceived as willing and able to use force if necessary; and, most important, her capacity to make the most difficult decision
of all -- whether to put young American women and men in harm's way.
Mrs. Clinton was an early advocate of the raid that brought Bin Laden to justice, in opposition to some of her most important
colleagues on the National Security Council. During the early debates about how we should respond to the Syrian civil war, she was
a strong proponent of a more aggressive approach, one that might have prevented the Islamic State from gaining a foothold in Syria.
I never saw her bring politics into the Situation Room. In fact, I saw the opposite. When some wanted to delay the Bin Laden raid
by one day because the White House Correspondents Dinner might be disrupted, she said, "Screw the White House Correspondents Dinner."
In sharp contrast to Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump has no experience on national security. Even more important, the character traits
he has exhibited during the primary season suggest he would be a poor, even dangerous, commander in chief.
These traits include his obvious need for self-aggrandizement, his overreaction to perceived slights, his tendency to make decisions
based on intuition, his refusal to change his views based on new information, his routine carelessness with the facts, his unwillingness
to listen to others and his lack of respect for the rule of law.
The dangers that flow from Mr. Trump's character are not just risks that would emerge if he became president. It is already damaging
our national security.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual
and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump's vulnerabilities by complimenting
him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated.
Mr. Putin is a great leader, Mr. Trump says, ignoring that he has killed and jailed journalists and political opponents, has invaded
two of his neighbors and is driving his economy to ruin. Mr. Trump has also taken policy positions consistent with Russian, not American,
interests -- endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia's annexation of Crimea and giving a green light
to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States.
In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.
Mr. Trump has also undermined security with his call for barring Muslims from entering the country. This position, which so clearly
contradicts the foundational values of our nation, plays into the hands of the jihadist narrative that our fight against terrorism
is a war between religions.
In fact, many Muslim Americans play critical roles in protecting our country, including the man, whom I cannot identify, who ran
the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center for nearly a decade and who I believe is most responsible for keeping America safe since the
Sept. 11 attacks.
My training as an intelligence officer taught me to call it as I see it. This is what I did for the C.I.A. This is what I am doing
now. Our nation will be much safer with Hillary Clinton as president.
Michael J. Morell was the acting director and deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2010 to 2013.
"... In the infamous Steele dossier , prepared for the Clinton campaign by a 'former' British spy, the first entry that is tying the Trump campaign to the 'Russian DNC hack' was allegedly written on July 28 2016. ..."
"... The president of Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity company which investigated the DNC leak, later said that his company never found any proof that Russia had hacked the DNC. ..."
"... The claims made in the Ratcliffe letter fit the timeline of the scandal as it developed. They supports the assertion that the Clinton campaign made up 'Russiagate' from whole cloth. It was supported in that by a myriad of media and by dozens of high level anti-Trump activists in the FBI and CIA. ..."
"... "There was no transition because they came after me trying to do a coup. They came after me spying on my campaign. They started from the day I won and even before I won. From the day I came down the escalator with our First Lady. They were a disaster. They were a disgrace to our country. And we've caught 'em. We've caught 'em all. We've got it all on tape. We've caught 'em all." ..."
"... The need to then cover for murder added to the urgency to propagate the whole "Russiagate" fiction. The US' misnamed "intelligence community" and mass media both were complicit in the murder of Rich, so they had additional motivation to lead the public off the scent with an entirely fabricated false narrative. ..."
"... I doubt that it was solely a Clinton operation. After all, CIA director Mike Morrell kicked it off with his piece in the NY Times, which signaled some significant level of support at least parts of the intelligence community. ..."
"... The whole Russiagate affaire was very reminiscent of the Ken Starr inquisition, which yielded nothing until Bubba cavalierly incriminated himself with Monica. Trump has yet to prove himself that stupid. ..."
"... Remember when Tulsi Gabbard called out Hillary Clinton about getting the media to support her Russiagating of her? ..."
"... "Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know -- it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. It's now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly." ..."
"... Seriously, Mr. President? You have been given a personal intelligence briefing from your CIA Director that one of the candidates to succeed you in the Presidency is an actual, bought and paid-for agent of Russia? And you don't go public because Ole Meanie Mitch won't let you ? ..."
"... This said to me that Obama knew it was all BS from the beginning. Of course, there have been gobs of disclosures and evidence since that it was fake and BS, and none whatsoever that it was real. ..."
"... Thanks to Wikileaks, we have a copy of an email exchange between Hillary's Campaign Manager, John Podesta and longtime Democratic operative Brent Budowsky talking about how Hillary should take on The Donald. Budowski tells Podesta: "Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin, but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria."" ..."
"... The Russiagate fabrication was a political convenience for the Dems, but it allowed Trump and his NATO/EU agents to sanction, pressurise, interfere with Russia in every dimension, because Trump 'had to' to show they he was not Russia's sock puppets! ..."
"... The video I just watched and linked to on the Week in Review thread makes this observation: The Ds burned the US-Russia relationship while the Rs made no real protest; now we have the Rs burning the US-China relationship while the Ds make no real protest. ..."
"... Assange announced on June 12, 2016 that a new tranche of DNC emails had been leaked to Wikileaks and was being prepared for publication. The effort to manufacture the false narrative about Russian hacking began immediately after that, likely within minutes of the announcement. ..."
"... A "populist outsider" will NEVER be allowed to win the Presidency. It was claimed that Obama was also a "populist outsider" yet he served the Deep State/Empire and the US establishment very well. ..."
"... Russiagate was primarily a means of initiating a new McCarthyism as part of a plan to counter Russia and China. ..."
Where the allegations that Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential elections made up by
the Clinton campaign?
A letter sent by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe seems
to suggest so :
On Tuesday, Ratcliffe, a loyalist whom Trump placed atop U.S. intelligence in the spring,
sent Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) a letter claiming that in late July 2016, U.S. intelligence
acquired "insight" into a Russian intelligence analysis. That analysis, Ratcliffe summarized
in his letter, claimed that Clinton had a plan to attack Trump by tying him to the 2016 hack
of the Democratic National Committee.
...
Ratcliffe stated that the intelligence community "does not know the accuracy of this
allegation or to the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect
exaggeration or fabrication."
The letter says that then CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama on the
intelligence. He reported that the Russians believed that Clinton approved the campaign plan on
July 26 2016.
So U.S. intelligence spying on Russian intelligence analysts found that the Russians
believed that Clinton started a 'Trump is supported by the Russian hacking of the DNC'
campaign. The Russian's surely had reason to think that.
Emails from the Democratic National Committee were published by Wikileaks on July 22
2016, shortly before the Democratic National Convention. They proved that during the primaries
the DNC had actively worked against candidate Bernie Sanders.
On July 24 Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook went on CNN and made, to my knowledge,
the very first
allegations (video) that Russia had 'hacked' the DNC in support of Donald Trump.
It is likely that the Russian analysts had seen that.
Mook's TV appearance was probably a test balloon raised to see if such claims would
stick.
Two days later Clinton allegedly approved campaign plans to emphasize such claims.
In the infamous Steele
dossier , prepared for the Clinton campaign by a 'former' British spy, the first entry that
is tying the Trump campaign to the 'Russian DNC hack' was allegedly written on July 28
2016.
The president of Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity company which investigated the DNC leak,
later said that his company
never found any proof that Russia had hacked the DNC.
There are suspicions that Seth Rich, an IT administrator for the DNC and Bernie Sanders
supporter, has leaked the DNC emails to Wikileaks . Rich was murdered on July 10 2016 in
Washington DC in an alleged 'robbery' during which nothing was stolen.
The claims made in the Ratcliffe letter fit the timeline of the scandal as it developed.
They supports the assertion that the Clinton campaign made up 'Russiagate' from whole cloth. It
was supported in that by a myriad of media and by dozens of high level anti-Trump activists in
the FBI and CIA.
Posted by b on September 30, 2020 at 16:04 UTC |
Permalink
Are you trying to tell me b that "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton is suspected of
wrongdoing?/snark
I am all for bringing down the whole house of corrupt cards that fronts for the private
finance cult. The Clintons are just examples of semi-recent to recent corruption. Obama is in
that boat as is Biden and others.
But just remember that Trump was already entirely corrupt before (s)elected into power.
Trump is just another front for global private finance evil that humanity must face.
Another "conspiracy theory" turned into conspiracy fact.
With regards to Killary being "supported in that by a myriad of media and by dozens of
anti-Trump activists...", well, it's a pay-to-play world and CGI was the
piggybank at that particular time...
thanks b... the timeline certainly fits and is consistent here.... larry johnson at sst has
an article up on the same topic... how much of this is coming out now due the election and
how much of it is coming out now, just because it happens to be coming out now??
It's hard to tell when Trump is ever being truthful, but in last night's debate he clearly
stated:
"There was no transition because they came after me trying to do a coup. They came after
me spying on my campaign. They started from the day I won and even before I won. From the day
I came down the escalator with our First Lady. They were a disaster. They were a disgrace to
our country. And we've caught 'em. We've caught 'em all. We've got it all on tape. We've
caught 'em all."
Whether that is indicative of an imminent substantial October surprise i guess we will all
have to wait and see.
The murder/robbery of Seth Rich has frequently been described as "botched" , which I
have always felt was a strange way to describe a murder. It is as if the mass media were
trying to exculpate the murderer even though we are supposed to not know who the murderer
actually is.
So nothing was taken from Rich, but perhaps that is because the murderer couldn't find
what he was looking for? The USB thumb drive with the purloined emails, maybe? Of course, by
the time Rich was murdered the emails had already been passed along to Wikileaks, but I
suppose the murderer might not have known that at the time. That would make an effort to
retrieve the emails "botched" , wouldn't it? This suggested to me from the moment that
I heard it that those in the mass media who seeded the story of a robbery being
"botched" in fact were knowingly covering for the effort to control the leak which was
what was "botched" .
The need to then cover for murder added to the urgency to propagate the whole
"Russiagate" fiction. The US' misnamed "intelligence community" and mass media
both were complicit in the murder of Rich, so they had additional motivation to lead the
public off the scent with an entirely fabricated false narrative.
With no evidence at all my suspicion is that Rich was killed as a crime of passion committed
by a hotheaded member of his own family, which would explain both the family's reticence and
the somewhat muted investigation.
There are suspicions that Seth Rich, an IT administrator for the DNC and Bernie Sanders
supporter, has leaked the DNC emails to Wikileaks. Rich was murdered on July 10 2016 in
Washington DC in an alleged 'robbery' during which nothing was stolen.
That explains why Bernie Sanders suddenly became the "sheep dog". He flat out doesn't want
to be assassinated and doesn't want his family to be also assassinated.
While it would be a boon for the nation, I rather doubt Trump will have Barr indict the
Clintons for their crimes or go after the daily fraud committed at the Fed or on Wall Street.
I doubt Trump has any inkling that in order to truly make America Great Again he must first
destroy the Financial Parasites who caused America's downfall in the first place. Thirty-four
days to go.
Assange repeatedly stated russia didn't leak the emails. i saw no compelling reason to think
he would lie about it. then when the steel dossier came out it was so over the top and reeked
of fabrication. the whole thing was so far fetched and then ratcheted up 1000 fold after she
lost the election as an excuse. she never took any responsibility for her loss.
i think what amazes me most is how the media, and everyone following along, believed this
story that drove the narrative for years. this ridiculous obsession with russia was all part
of a coverup to distract the public from how rotten to the core the dnc is.
The mention of Seth Rich in connection with Russiagate prompted a hazy recollection of an
article over at SST by Larry C Johnson (LCJ), who has been exposing flaws in the Russiagate
fiasco for several years. LCJ deduced from the publicly-available Wikileaks/DNC files that
they couldn't have been hacked over the WWW because the timestamp for each file indicated
that those files came from a portable device, a thumb drive. From that info, and Assange
being very upset about the murder of Seth Rich, LCJ concluded that Rich sent the DNC files to
Wikileaks.
I looked up SST's "Russiagate" files and found the relevant article dated August 28, 2019
from which the following brief extract is the section mentioning file-types which LCJ found
so compelling...
... An examination of the Wikileaks DNC files shows they were created on 23 and 25 May and 26
August respectively. The fact that they appear in a FAT system format indicates the data was
transfered to a storage device, such as a thumb drive.
How can you prove this? The truth lies in the "last modified" time stamps on the
Wikileaks files. Every single one of these time stamps end in even numbers. If you are not
familiar with the FAT file system, you need to understand that when a date is stored under
this system the data rounds the time to the nearest even numbered second.
Bill examined 500 DNC email files stored on Wikileaks and found that all 500 files
ended in an even number -- 2, 4, 6, 8 or 0. If a system other than FAT had been used, there
would have been an equal probability of the time stamp ending with an odd number. But that is
not the case with the data stored on the Wikileaks site. All end with an even number.
...
I doubt that it was solely a Clinton operation. After all, CIA director Mike Morrell kicked
it off with his piece in the NY Times, which signaled some significant level of support at
least parts of the intelligence community.
The whole Russiagate affaire was very reminiscent of the Ken Starr inquisition, which
yielded nothing until Bubba cavalierly incriminated himself with Monica. Trump has yet to
prove himself that stupid.
I suspect that Hillary was delighted at the prospect of revenge for all she and Bubba had
gone through in the 1990s...except that she totally blew it...
Remember when Tulsi Gabbard called out Hillary Clinton about getting the media to support her
Russiagating of her? Here it is, you can see she blames Hillary as the source of the story:
"Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption,
and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have
finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has
been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why.
Now we know -- it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate
media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. It's now clear that this primary is
between you and me. Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly."
The Ballad of Tulsi and Hillary shows us how much the US and the world lost by the media
supporting Hillary in her plan to Russiagate the world.
The letter says that then CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama on the
intelligence. He reported that the Russians believed that Clinton approved the campaign plan
on July 26 2016.
I was one of those who thought that the whole Russia conspiracy was dubious from day one,
although I might have been kind of, "Well, maybe " for a day or so.
But that line from your post I quoted above points to one of the earliest and most
convincing pieces of evidence to me that the whole thing was fake. It was reported early on
that Obama had been briefed on the Russian interference and he wanted to go public to the
American people about what was going on, but Senator Mitch McConnell wouldn't agree to
it!
Seriously, Mr. President? You have been given a personal intelligence briefing from your
CIA Director that one of the candidates to succeed you in the Presidency is an actual, bought
and paid-for agent of Russia? And you don't go public because Ole Meanie Mitch won't let
you ?
This said to me that Obama knew it was all BS from the beginning. Of course, there have
been gobs of disclosures and evidence since that it was fake and BS, and none whatsoever that
it was real.
Even with all the revelations debunking the whole Russiagate narrative, the Deep State has
been successful in instilling in the news media, Hollywood, political elites of both parties,
and the overwhelming base of the democratic party that Russia somehow "installed" Trump, that
he is a Putin "puppet/puppy" (your choice), and any resistance to establishment democratic
party power is due to Russian manipulation of social media, and in general Russia (etc.) is
fundamental to causing social and political problems. It took America about seven years to
get over McCarthyism. Russiagate will stay in American discourse for a long time.
The dangerous part of Russiagate is that it has reached the level of hysteria that it can
be used by American Deep State to justify direct and dangerous confrontations with Russia up
to and including war. Russiagate pales the propaganda about Saddam and WNDs. Let us remember
that two days into the US invasion of Iraq, the invasion had a 72% approval rating according
to Gallup. Any conflict with Russia will probably have even higher approval levels.
Between Trump and Biden, it is Biden who will be the most likely to start the final
conflagration.
@hoarsewhisperer I trust that the time stamps indicates that a FAT format was used at a
certain stage. What I don't recall is that how this would exclude workflows which involve an
USB stick at any later stage after a hack. I think this technical proof is not as decisive as
it seems and calculating huge statistical odds does not change that. The fact that the NSA
has not come up with proof, now that does mean something. Something Baskervillish.
Found it interesting that in the very mainstream 'Friends' sitcom it was already a joke in
the 90s that "gi joe looks after american foreign oil interests".
Except for a few conflict sitreps there really hasn't been much of note posted here this
year.
Former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney has also argued that the data could not have been
hacked because internet speeds at the time were not sufficient for the transfer of the data
when it was extracted. He claims that the speed was consistent with saving to a thumb drive.
The word "botched" could have been invented to explain why nothing was stolen, in order to
put off those who questioned the motive.
No witness came forward but it could be that someone saw the shooting from a distance and
yelled at the perp.
"Ratcliffe's letter, which is based on information obtained by the CIA, states that Hillary
decided on 26 July 2016 to launch the Russia/Trump strategem. But the CIA was mistaken. The
Clinton effort started in 2015--December 2015 to be precise.
Thanks to Wikileaks, we have a copy of an email exchange between Hillary's Campaign
Manager, John Podesta and longtime Democratic operative Brent Budowsky talking about how
Hillary should take on The Donald. Budowski tells Podesta:
"Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin, but not go too far betting
on Putin re Syria.""
Larry Johnson wrote today in his article "I Told You Long Ago, Hillary's Team Helped
Fabricate the Trump Russia Collusion Lie by Larry C Johnson"
If I remember correctly Obummer signed legislation making it ok for the press to openly lie
to everyone in the us! HR4310, legalized propaganda for US consumption. He gave us fake news!
The constant stream of US, UK, NATO, EU fabrications framing Russia, from MH17, Skripal,
'interfering in elections' garbage, the Navalry poisoning, coupled with endless provocations
like interfering in the Syrian settlement, twisting the OPCW work, attempting to destroy the
Iran nuclear agreement and so much more appear to -finally - running out Russia's strategic
patience with the Trump administration.
1. 24 September Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov:
"...the incumbent US administration has lost its diplomatic skills almost for good."
"we have come to realise that in terms of Germany and its EU and NATO allies' conduct, ...it
is impossible to deal with the West until it stops using provocations and fraud and starts
behaving honestly and responsibly."
The Russiagate fabrication was a political convenience for the Dems, but it allowed Trump
and his NATO/EU agents to sanction, pressurise, interfere with Russia in every dimension,
because Trump 'had to' to show they he was not Russia's sock puppets!
Looks like Russia might be shifting strategy from strictly going through the defined and
agreed processes in relation to problems with the West to perhaps not engaging so
meticulously.
After all, what's the point when the agreed processes are ignored by the other party?
So, does "impossible to deal with" mean "will not deal with"?
The video I just watched and linked to on the Week in Review thread makes this observation:
The Ds burned the US-Russia relationship while the Rs made no real protest; now we have the
Rs burning the US-China relationship while the Ds make no real protest.
Many other nations
are watching, some already having joined the China-Russia bloc while others get ready as they
watch what little remains of US soft power go down the tubes thanks to Imperial tactics being
deployed onto US streets. Meanwhile, lurking not too far away is the coming escalation of the
financial crisis which Trump's Trade War has exacerbated. Those running this show are myopic
to the max--in order to post an economic recovery, the markets existing in those nations now
being alienated will be essential since the domestic market will be far too weak to fuel a
recovery by itself, even with enlightened leadership.
"On July 24 Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook went on CNN and made, to my knowledge, the
very first allegations (video) that Russia had 'hacked' the DNC in support of Donald
Trump."
It is not the case that it was the first such allegation. To my knowledge, the first such
allegation that was published was published on 14 June 2016 in the Washington Post,
headlining "Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump"
and I provide here an archived link to it instead of that newspaper's link, so that no
paywall will block a reader from seeing that article: https://archive.is/T4C2G
powerandpeople @28: "So, does "impossible to deal with" mean "will not deal with"?"
Highly unlikely. The Russians will continue to pursue reason even after the war on Russia
goes hot. If the Russians give up on diplomacy then that means Lavrov is out of a job. The
Russians are capable of walking and chewing gum, or shooting and talking as the case may be,
at the same time.
By the way, I think the same is true for the Chinese, even if they have not done much
shooting lately. When America's war against them goes hot they will keep the door to
diplomacy open throughout the conflict. Neither of these countries wants a war and it is the
US that is pushing for one. They will be happy to stop the killing as soon as the US does.
Personally I think that may be a mistake because when the war goes hot and the US suffers
some military defeats and sues for peace, if America still has the capability to wage war
then the peace will just be temporary. The US will use any cessation of hostilities to rearm
and try to catch its imagined enemies off guard.
Whether or not the US will be able to rearm after significant military defeats in its
current de-industrialized condition is another matter.
How can the US possibly contemplate a war with China? The US cannot function without China's
production. To cite just one example; eighty percent of US pharmaceuticals are produced in
China. The US needs China far more than China needs the US. A war with China is a war the US
cannot win.
Assange announced on June 12, 2016 that a new tranche of DNC emails had been leaked to
Wikileaks and was being prepared for publication. The effort to manufacture the false
narrative about Russian hacking began immediately after that, likely within minutes of
the announcement.
We already knew that Hillary had engaged Steele in Spring 2016 as what was termed an
"insurance policy". This "insurance" angle makes no sense: 1) Hillary was the overwhelming
favorite when she engaged Steele and had virtually unlimited resources that she could call
upon. And, 2) the bogus findings in Steele's dossier could easily be debunked by any
competent intelligence agency so it wasn't any sort of "insurance" at all.
<> <> <> <> <>
That Hillary started Russiagate is not surprising. This limited hangout, which is
so titillating to some, is meant to cover for a far greater conspiracy than Hillary's
vindictiveness.
We should first recognize a few things:
the Empire is a bi-partisan affair;
the Presidency is the lynch-pin of the Empire;
it became apparent in 2013-14 that the Empire (aka "World Order") was at grave risk as
Russia's newfound militancy showed that her alliance with China had teeth.
the 2016 race was KNOWN to be rigged via Hillary's collusion with DNC and Sanders'
sheepdogging (Note: After the collusion became know, Hillary gave disgraced Debra
Wasserman-Shultz a high-level position within Hillary's campaign - further angering
progressives). Why does it surprise anyone that the General Election was also rigged?
These facts lead to the following conclusions:
A "populist outsider" will NEVER be allowed to win the Presidency. It was claimed that
Obama was also a "populist outsider" yet he served the Deep State/Empire and the US
establishment very well.
Hillary's 2016 "campaign mistakes" were likely deliberate/calculated to allow Trump to
win. MAGA Nationalist Trump was the Deep State's favorite. This explains why Trump
announced that he would not investigate the Clintons within days of his being elected and
why Trump picked close associates of all his 'Never Trump' Deep State enemies to fill key
posts in his Administration such as: John Brennan's gal Gina Haspel for CIA Director; John
McCain's guy Mike Pence as VP; the Bush's guy William Barr for Attorney General; and the
neocon's John Bolton for NSA.
Russiagate was primarily a means of initiating a new McCarthyism as part of a plan to
counter Russia and China.
David @32: "How can the US possibly contemplate a war with China?"
Sadly, the United States is suffering from delusions of exceptionality. Mass psychosis.
The importance of industrial capacity is radically underestimated by the top economic
theorists (and thus advisors) in the West, and except for some of the deplorable working
people in America and perhaps about five or six Marxists in the country, the rest of the
American population is equally delusional. "Well, if we can't get it from China then we
will just order it from Amazon!
is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ' SCORPION
KING : America's Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.' He served in the
Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf's staff during
the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter The US seeks to
pressure Russia by threatening to reactivate nuclear capability mothballed under the New START
treaty if Moscow refuses to renegotiate. All it will accomplish by this is prove it habitually
cheats on arms control.
According
to Politico, "The Trump administration has asked the military to assess how quickly it
could pull nuclear weapons out of storage and load them onto bombers and submarines" when
the New START treaty limiting the size of the US and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals expires
in February. Politico sources its story "to three people familiar with the discussions."
According to these sources, the request was made to the US Strategic Command as "part of a
strategy to pressure Moscow into renegotiating the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty before
the US presidential election."
What is curious about this report is that US Strategic Command already knows the answer to
the request. To meet the level of warhead reductions mandated under the treaty, the US has
decreased the number of warheads carried on the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic
missile (ICBM) from three to one, and on its
Trident D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) from up to 14 to around 5 or
6.
The deactivated warheads were
reclassified as either active or inactive. Active warheads are kept fully assembled and
subjected to the same level of maintenance and upgrades as their operational counterparts, and
can be reactivated in accordance with guidelines already established by US Strategic Command.
Inactive warheads have been partially disassembled, and their reactivation would take longer
than for their active counterparts, but is similarly regulated by US Strategic Command
directives. Moreover, the US regularly
conducts tests where it reconverts the Minuteman III ICBM to a three-warhead configuration
to practice for the very activities suggested in the Politico article. The timelines associated
with this reconversion are well known to US Strategic Command. It is not publicly known whether
the US Navy conducts similar re-conversion flight tests of its Trident D-5 SLBMs.
One aspect of this request that, if it were implemented, would fall outside the existing
reactivation guidelines set by US Strategic Command is if the US were to reconvert its fleet of
Trident ballistic missile submarines from its current configuration under New START to one
where no restrictions applied. This possibility raises some interesting questions about US
compliance with New START.
According to Section 1 , paragraph 3
in Part Three of the Protocol to the treaty,
"If an ICBM launcher, SLBM launcher, or heavy bomber is converted by rendering it
incapable of employing ICBMs, SLBMs, or nuclear armaments, so that the other Party can confirm
the results of the conversion, such a converted strategic offensive arm shall cease to be
subject to the aggregate numbers provided for in Article II of the Treaty and may be used for
purposes not inconsistent with the Treaty."
To meet its obligations under New START, the US converted four SLBM launchers on each of its
14 Trident ballistic missile submarines – a total of 56 – to remove them from the
permitted number of launchers. This conversion was done by removing the gas generators of the
ejecting mechanism from the launch tube and bolting the tube covers shut.
On February 27, 2018, the Russian Foreign Ministry
protested the American actions, noting that, in regard to the Trident conversions, they
were "converted in such a way that the Russian Federation cannot confirm that these
strategic arms have been rendered incapable of employing SLBMs."
The Russians were concerned that the Trident SLBM conversions were not irreversible, as
required under the terms of the treaty, and that the 56 launchers listed as having been
"rendered incapable of employing SLBMs" should rather have been categorized as
"non-deployed launchers" and not excluded from the total aggregate count. To put it
bluntly, the Russians were accusing the United States of cheating on the New START
Treaty.
If true, the threat made by Marshall Billingslea in his interview with the Russian Kommersant paper on
September 21 to "reconvert our weapons" , if applied to the Trident ballistic missile
submarine launch tubes, would not only confirm the Russian suspicions, but certify the US as an
untrustworthy negotiating partner in any future arms control negotiations, either with Russia
or China.
Washington already has one strike against it in this regard: its contention that the Mk 41
launcher used on the Aegis Ashore anti-ballistic missile system could not be used as a cruise
missile launcher, and, as such, did not constitute a violation of the Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. This was shown to be a lie when, less than a month after the US
withdrew from the INF Treaty, it conducted a flight test of a cruise missile fired from the
same Mk 41
launcher .
If the Politico reporting is accurate, the US military has been ordered to carry out an
exercise that is redundant insofar as the data is already known, and which does nothing to
further US strategic capabilities. Moreover, if the US plans on increasing its SLBM launch
capability by reactivating the 56 SLBM launchers ostensibly rendered inoperable under New
START, Marshall Billingslea would be undermining his own stated objective of trying to pressure
Russia back to the negotiating table before the November 2020 presidential election. After all,
who in their right mind would be willing to negotiate with a proven cheater?
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Clinton approved an advisor's proposal to "vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal
claiming interference by Russian security services" in July 2016, according to information
declassified on Tuesday by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe. The bombshell
revelation was made public in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.
Carolina), in response to a request for information related to the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane
(i.e. Russiagate) probe.
By the end of July 2016, US intelligence agencies had picked up chatter that their Russian
counterparts not only knew of the scheme, but that Clinton was behind it – though the
declassified material stresses that the American intelligence community "does not know the
accuracy" of the claim that Clinton had green-lighted such a plan, or whether the Russians
were exaggerating. However, then-CIA director John Brennan apparently followed up that
assessment by briefing then-President Barack Obama on Clinton's Russian smear scheme, according
to his handwritten notes – suggesting the spy agencies were very much aware what was
going on.
The news made a splash among the president's supporters and other Russiagate skeptics, one
of whom observed the timing of the events described in the declassified material dovetailed
seamlessly with the timetable in which Russiagate was unveiled to the public. Clinton staffer
Robby Mook appeared on CNN on July 24, 2016 to claim that "Russian state
actors broke into the [Democratic National Committee]" and "stole" the campaign's
emails "for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump."
Former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele filed his report around the same date,
accusing the Trump campaign of colluding with Russian security services to hack the DNC and
dump the emails via Wikileaks. The false information that made up the infamous "peepee
dossier" – collected under contract from opposition research firm Fusion GPS –
was used to justify securing a FISA warrant for Trump campaign aide Carter Page. That warrant,
and others that followed, have since been declared invalid, as it was discovered the Obama
administration had "violated its duty of candor" on its application for every
warrant.
Just a month before the 2016 election, Obama's intelligence agencies announced that they
believed Russia was responsible for hacking the DNC – allegations it has since emerged
were made without even examining the server on which the emails were stored.
More than a year after the release of special counsel Robert Mueller's report shocked
Russiagate true believers with the absence of the promised proof of collusion, the colossal
conspiracy theory has all but unraveled.
Over the past three months, the Russian Be-200ES amphibious aircraft flew more than 200
times for suppressing wildland fires in Turkey. Aircraft with Russian crews onboard have been
participating in the firefighting missions at difficult and strategically important places
and locations since June 16. Total flight time exceeded 400 hours .
####
I don't know how I missed this.
So while Russia has been putting out fires in fancy parts of Turkey (Izmir), Turkey has
been continuing its fires in Syria!
Fighting between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces over the disputed region of
Nagorno-Karabakh intensified, on Monday, with heavy civilian and military casualties reported
amid disputed claims of an Azeri warplane being shot down.
Azerbaijani troops and forces from Nagorno-Karabakh have been trading artillery and rocket
fire, with the population of much of Karabakh told to seek shelter. Meanwhile, Armenia has
declared a general mobilization and barred men between the ages of 18 and 55 from leaving the
country, except with the approval of military authorities.
The most intense attacks took place in the Aras river valley, near the border with Iran, and
the Matagis-Talish front in the northeast of the region, according to Armenian Defense Ministry
spokesman Artsrun Hovhannisyan. He claimed that the Azeri side has lost 22 tanks and a dozen
other vehicles, along with 370 dead and many wounded.
Artur Sargsyan, deputy commander of the Nagorno-Karabakh military, said their own losses so
far have amounted to 84 dead and more than 200 wounded. Both figures should be understood in
the context of an ongoing information war run by the belligerents.
Vagram Pogosyan, spokesman for the president of the self-declared Artsakh Republic –
the ethnic Armenian de-facto government in the capital Stepanakert – said their forces
shot down an Azeri An-2 airplane outside the town of Martuni on Monday. This is in addition to
some three dozen drones, including ones provided by Turkey, that the Armenian forces claim to
have shot down over the past 48 hours.
Baku has denied the reports, saying only that two civilians were killed on Monday, in
addition to five on Sunday, and 30 were injured. There was no official information on military
casualties. Reports concerning the downed airplane were rejected as "not corresponding to
reality."
Azeri forces have taken several strategically important locations near the village of Talish
in Nagorno-Karabakh, Colonel Anar Eyvazov, spokesman for the Defense Ministry in Baku, said in
a statement. He was also quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying that Lernik Vardanyan, an
Armenian airborne commander, was killed near Talish. Armenia has denied this and labelled it
"disinformation."
In a video conference on Monday, Azeri President Ilham Aliyev told UN General Secretary
Antonio Guterres that the question of Nagorno-Karabakh should be resolved in line with UN
Security Council resolutions guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, and called
for the urgent withdrawal of Armenian troops from "occupied territories."
The current Azeri offensive is backed by Turkey, whose President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has
called Armenia "the biggest threat" to peace in the region and called for it to end the
"occupation" of Azeri land.
"Recent developments have given all influential regional countries an opportunity to put
in place realistic and fair solutions," he said in Istanbul on Monday.
Unconfirmed reports that Turkish-backed militants from northern Syria have been transported
to Azerbaijan to fight the Armenians have been denied by Baku as "complete nonsense."
They amount to "another provocation from the Armenian side," Khikmet Gadzhiev, an aide
to President Aliyev, told Al Jazeera.
Meanwhile, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan vowed his people "won't retreat a
single millimeter from defending our people and our Artsakh." All Armenians "must unite
to defend our history, our homeland, identity, our future and our present, " Pashinyan
tweeted on Sunday from
Yerevan.
Nagorno-Karabakh is one of several border disputes left over from the collapse of the Soviet
Union. An enclave predominantly populated by Armenians, it seceded from Azerbaijan in 1988 and
declared itself the Republic of Artsakh following a bitter war in 1992-94.
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In Karabakh Turkish drones #Bayraktar started systematic destruction of enemy armored
vehicles. Of course they are ruled by the Turks. Azerbaijani operators simply could not learn
how to manage them in such a short time. The Armenian side opposes them with the outdated
Osa-AKM complexes. They cannot cope with this task.
Most likely, the Coral electronic warfire system operate in conjusction with the drones.
They create interference, operators are distracted by false targets, while drones enter the
target and destroy it. If in the near future the Armenian side will not be able to quickly
clear the airspace, then the Azerbaijanis will show many more shots with the destruction of
armored vehicles.
What can be opposed to #Bayraktar ? Do not think that they are invulnerable. "BUKs" and
"Pantsir" systems cope well with them. But we cannot say yet whether they are in the area of
hostilities.
By their actions, the Ottomans make it clear that strike drones will be deployed anywhere in
the world where there are Turkish interests. That's their brand. Similar to the Syrian
mercenaries. Accordingly, their opponents first of all need to think about building an
effective air defense system.
If you have a territorial dispute with Turkey, then it is better not to run to the UN with
another note of protest. And he will directly turn to Russia with a request to urgently sell
several "BUKs". Trust that there will be much more benefit from it. Indeed, while the world
community calls on the parties to sit down at the negotiating table, dozens of your soldiers
are dying on the battlefields. And "BUK" in seconds can prove to a presumptuous guest that he
was not expected in this sky. And neither he nor his brothers should appear here.
Interesting link Evdokimova, 79% Armenians and 84% Azerbaijanis want the USSR back, that
goes to confirm the castotrophe of the USSR dissolution, of course there would be no wars in
that inmense area, in exchange for McDonalds advertised by Gorby we have now conflicts
galore, Moldavia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kirguizia,
Abjazia, Osetia.... and who needs to eat that crap?
An opportunity to hit several skittles with one ball was too much to leave alone for the
Turks, especially if the skittles could be hit down in someone else's backyard and
particularly if that someone else happens to be a client state of Turkey's.
It surely also suits the United States in some way, if that opportunity leads to Russia
and Iran becoming bogged down fighting in the Caucasus, and they are forced to take their
attention (and money, arms and fighters) away from Idlib province in NW Syria.
So presumably if the Azeris could beat the Armenians with imported "Syrian rebels", that
then would encourage home-grown rebel wannabes in Daghestan, Chechnya and other Muslim areas
in the northern Caucasus to "rise up" against Russian rule. At the same time, Azeris in NW
Iran would be inspired (in the wildest dreams of both the American and Turkish governments)
to rise up against Tehran and declare their part of Iran independent.
Unfortunately the Armenians, despite their government's pro-American tendencies, recovered
from what must have been surprise attacks and were able to retaliate quickly and hard. Now
Russia has taken the high road and offered itself as a mediator.
Let's see if the US and the EU can persuade the Armenians with their offers of loans worth
billions (presumably contingent on Armenians deferring to Israel as to whose Holocaust
deserves to be called a "Holocaust" and not a mere genocide - even though Winston Churchill
about 100 years ago or so used the term to describe the Ottoman massacres of Armenians and
other Christian groups in their empire) away from Russian mediation and negotiation. If the
money fails to lure Armenia into the IMF / World Bank debt trap, there goes the opportunity
to scatter all the skittles.
I'm trying to get a better contextual setup to this conflict. I recall the USA directed
coup attempt dubber "Electric Yerevan" when a company from said nation bought the power
company, ran it into the ground and used it as a basis for sparking protests. Next I am
hearing that the current president is a "Random Guido" who answer to the USA. If so how does
this effect Armenias strategic partnership with Russia? From what little I know about the
Armenian spirit they are fiercely devoted to their culture. Many Americans of Armenian would
fly back to the old country in order to take up arms. It seems as though this conflict is
going to escalate if only because the damage done so far. Armenia is fully mobilizing.
In regard to the Donbass situation, I gathered that the Ukrops army was heavily laden with
conscripts many of whom fled to Russia. They succumbed to the cauldron tactic due in part to
be order by "results driven" leaders in the rear. That and they stuck to the roads and were
easily flanked by smaller NAF units operating "in the green" What I found interesting (and
disturbing) about this conflict is that it resembles what could very well happen in the USA,
minus the armor although....
I'm trying to get a better contextual setup to this conflict. I recall the USA directed
coup attempt dubber "Electric Yerevan" when a company from said nation bought the power
company, ran it into the ground and used it as a basis for sparking protests. Next I am
hearing that the current president is a "Random Guido" who answer to the USA. If so how does
this effect Armenias strategic partnership with Russia? From what little I know about the
Armenian spirit they are fiercely devoted to their culture. Many Americans of Armenian would
fly back to the old country in order to take up arms. It seems as though this conflict is
going to escalate if only because the damage done so far. Armenia is fully mobilizing.
In regard to the Donbass situation, I gathered that the Ukrops army was heavily laden with
conscripts many of whom fled to Russia. They succumbed to the cauldron tactic due in part to
be order by "results driven" leaders in the rear. That and they stuck to the roads and were
easily flanked by smaller NAF units operating "in the green" What I found interesting (and
disturbing) about this conflict is that it resembles what could very well happen in the USA,
minus the armor although....
Although it is, clearly I suppose, not my field, from known and new mostly military
analysis sources recently found, I will try form a somehow readable post...( forgive thus
if I do not write the weapons denomination correctly...I make the effort to keep you
informed...and alos take into account, I am figuring out the events without thoroughly
studying the maps, I have passed the day working/making food shopping/taking a nap... )
On the doubts about whether Russia would intervene on behalf of Armenia, that wouldv
happen if Armenia request assistance under CIS agreements, but Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh
( currently Republic of Arsakh, the name of ancient Great Armenia, to eliminate the azeri
denomination Karabakh.. ) is not Armenia, it is a region which apealed self-determination
but not recognized by any nation so far...not even by Armenia, due the ceasfire signed in
1994 ( what implies that the war never ended, but was frozen for a while, to be reignited
from time to time...) Thread ( you translate the Twitts on your own this time...otherwise
would get too long post..)
Both countries are very mountainous terrain, this is Caucasus, what makes advancement
quite difficult, thus, eventhough at first moments success was falling on the side of
Azerbaijan ( which counts with the unestimable help of Turkish swarms of drones and
intelligence from Turkish AWACSm it seems that Armenia, which has its borders mined, has
inflicted heavy loses in armor to Azerbaijan today, destroyed and captured....( warning
disturbing content of people flying in the air space..), also list of fallen in the
Armenian side, most milennials...This is when most fallen could have originated...in
Martakhert, in the North...
#LATEST HOUR #URGENT #Azerbaiyan army claims to have destroyed #Armenia's air defense in
Martakhert (north), with 12 OSA systems destroyed. The #Martakhert garrison would be
surrounded and offered the option to surrender.
#LATEST HOUR First list of fallen in combat by #Armenia. Note that most are kids born in
2000. The Armenian Defense Ministry also claims that during a successful counterattack
they have captured 11 armor including an advanced BMP-3.
It seems that modern warfare through drones is rendering heavy armor a bit obsolete,
well, like seating ducks slowly advancing in mountainous terrain of Caucasus..
The miniature air campaign being carried out by the #Azerbaijan drones against #Armenia
seems to be very successful. Its main protagonist is being the MAM-L micromissiles from
#Turkey.
#Azerbaiyan has already deployed the TOS-1 Buratino thermobaric rocket launchers. The
#Azerbaiyan drone air campaign continues to wreak havoc on the Armenian ranks.
BTW, @flighradar24, where some people use to follow flights path is under attack...guys
are saying this is Turkey/ Azrbaijan so that their drones can not be followed..
Some additional points in this thread by another guy who works for @descifraguerra, with
what is described by him as #cutremapa ( an outline made in the run without much
precision so as to clarify his points.. ):
There are skirmishes throughout practically the entire front but the "serious" fighting
is concentrated in the areas marked A (Murov Peak), B (Agdara - Heyvali axis) and C
(Fuzuli region). Especially in the latter, I refer to the video.
The ultimate goal of the Azeris appears to be a south-north pincer on the capital of
Artsakh, Stepanakert, with all the difficulties that this entails. Taking this into
account, it seems that there are two previous objectives.
The first of these objectives is to cut the M11, the main logistics artery of Artsakh,
for which they have two options: A) Take the peak of Murov and block the road taking
advantage of the heights. But storming up the mountain is always tricky.
B) Take the Heyvali junction. To do so, they must first cross several towns, such as
Aghdara, and it is in this area where it seems that more artillery fire is concentrating
in the last hours.
The second ideal objective would be to cut the M12, the second most important road in
the area and therefore the second most important supply route, but considering its
position this is something very difficult to carry out in most of its tracing.
So it seems that they are opting for a second objective, a priori simpler: to capture
the Fuzali region (remember, zone C on the map) and cut the M12 at the entrance to
Stepanakert itself (just 1.37 km south From the capital).
For now, it seems that the Armenians are holding up well to the south, although it is
the front in which the most intense fighting has taken place so far this day, but they
have less and less anti-aircraft and that allows the Azeri drones to act.
On the growing military drone industry being built by Turkey ( guess where the command
and control of those swarms of drones attacking one day after another Khmeimin and Syrian
positions and warehousesd is placed ), in the hands of his son-in-law, it seems that Syrian
oil smuggling resulted most profitting...
Turkey is laying the foundations of its geopolitics in the massive use of drones in
places of conflict where it has great interests.
To achieve his goals, Erdogan managed to establish his own drone industry. He is
currently in the hands of one of his sons-in-law.
But Erdogan is so blatant in his challenges that it is plain he fancies Turkey to be
Russia's equal on the world stage, and dares to poke it even as he takes actions that result
in greater power and influence for Turkey. He needs a hard kick in the ass to remind him
where his provocative actions are taking him. The west is unhappy with Turkey's cozying-up to
Russsia, but is doubtless delighted when he behaves like this.
Maybe Armenia could call it's new friends in NATO and in the EU
Please read the following it is a quote from an article over a Moon of Alabama.
" .. . Although a long-standing Russian partner, Armenia has also developed ties with the
West: It provides troops to NATO-led operations in Afghanistan and is a member of NATO's
Partnership for Peace, and it also recently agreed to strengthen its political ties with the
EU. The United States might try to encourage Armenia to move fully into the NATO orbit. If
the United States were to succeed in this policy, then Russia might be forced to withdraw
from its army base at Gyumri and an army and air base near Yerevan (currently leased until
2044), and divert even more resources to its Southern Military District. "
Armenia after its colour revolution started to act in an anti -Russian way
Yet Russia is supposed to feel obliged to help Armenia?
What for? they have shown that they are going in another direction
And I think both Azerbaijan and Turkey looked at Armenia's behaviour to Russia and are
taking full advantage of a weakened alliance.
You make some good points. If Armenia has politically distanced itself from Russia and
approached the West and the NATO then it makes no sense for Russia to offer help without
strings attached. But Russia cannot let Turkey/Azerbaijan overrun Armenia either, or let
Azerbaijan grab Nagarno-Karabakh, because it would strengthen Turkish position too much in
the Caucasus region.
Yes, you are plainly having the time of your life and yukking it up again like you do
whenever something difficult happens to put Russia in a bad position – plainly, you are
a real friend of Russia, and only motivated by concern. Keep on laughing and making jokes.
Perhaps Russia should drop a bunker-buster on your house – would that be a martial
enough reaction for you?
They should – they should smack down a Turkish aircraft without warning and at the
first available opportunity. Russia is trying to stabilize the situation and calm things
down, while Turkey is openly backing Azerbaijan's military operation. A hard slap now could
break the cycle, but it seems plain Erdogan will get away with whatever he is allowed to.
It almost doesn't matter whether Turkey shot down the Armenian Su-25, rather that Armenia
has publicly stated it. This is about crossing the Rubicon. For all the chest-beating and rah
rah rah from In'Sultin' Erd O'Grand & Aliyev, both states have denied it happened. Here
we clearly see the gulf between broadcast to self-and actual potential consequences of such
an action.
Add to that Armenia has been open (not necessarily transparent) about its losses. Theres
been nothing from Azerbaidjan except American Vietnam war style 'body counts' of
Armenians.
It looks to me that Armenia are upping the ante to the max. and Azerbaidjan is left
wanting by its response which makes no sense if its claims of victories/whatever are anywhere
near true.
What I really want to know is what if any assistance, apart from words, the US is
providing and comparatively Russia. One or them is clearly in a much better position than the
other. There's really not much to go on as we know Russia does not broadcast and it certainly
would not be in the current 'pro-EU' Armenian administrations interest either. Yet again, we
are only left to ask what hasn't been said & done.
As far as I can see, Armenia is keeping most of its powder dry. The threat of 'other
measures' is currently more useful (and doesn't entail the same risks) than actually enacting
them. Maybe Putin will invite €µ to cover Aliyev's humilition as Sarkozy was for
Sakaashiti's? Now that would be funny, but we must not get ahead of ourselves..
Strategically, each time In'Sultin' Erd O'Grand backs stunts like these, he exposes
himself further to trouble at home. For Russia, not being fully NATO onside is evidently
quite useful however distasteful his behavior is, but he may well be undoing himself and
putting Turkey squarely back in to the western camp overall but retaining its nationalist Big
Boy streak.
Осеннее
военное
обострение в
Нагорном
Карабахе для
многих стало
совершенной
неожиданностью.
Но специалисты,
которые следят
за
военно-политической
обстановкой в
Закавказье,
подобное
развитие
событий давно
предсказывали.
В частности,
эксперты
Центра анализа
стратегий и
технологий
(ЦАСТ) еще два
года назад
спрогнозировали
обострение
ситуации в
Карабахе. В их
книге "В
ожидании бури:
Южный Кавказ"
даны оценки,
которые, судя
по всему,
подтверждаются
сегодня, пишет
Сергей
Вальченко в
материале для
сайта MK.ru
####
More at the link.
This looks like a reasonable analysis. If you are lazy like I am, use and online
translator.
I don't see how Armenia can accept the loss of critical territory even if the Azeri
operations are 'limited.' According to the interview, Azerbiajan is repeating the tactics of
2018 which is a big NO NO according to Tsun Tzu. I would be surprises is Armenia hasn't
already planned for this. The big fly in this ointment is Yerevan which may delay or limit a
response and listen to its 'western partners.' That would cement Azeri successes and damage
the 'Pro-EU' government. One reasonable strategy would be to actually encourage Azeri
'successes' as tehy would be tempted to go further than their limited goals and draw the
forces in to a pre-prepared 'cauldron', aka kiling zone as occured previously in the Donbass
and wrap up the Azeri army and gain ground. There's the risk that it wouldn't work either,
yet again Tsun Tzu do not fight the next war as you fough the last
On Sunday Ilham Aliyev, the longtime dictator of Azerbaijan,
launched a war on the Armenian held Nagorno-Karabakh area. That he dared to do this now, 27
years after a ceasefire ended a war over the area, is a sign that the larger strategic picture
has changed.
When the Soviet Union fell apart the Nagorno-Karabakh area had a mixed population of
Azerbaijani (also called Azeri) Shia Muslims and Armenian Christians. As in other former Soviet
republics ethnic diversity became problematic when the new states evolved. The mixed areas were
fought over and Armenia won the Nagorno-Karabakh area. There have since been several border
skirmishes and small wars between the two opponents but the intensity of the fighting is now
much higher than before.
In 1994 the Armenians won and forced Azerbaijan to a ceasefire. In the meantime
Nagorno-Karabakh organized itself into a sovereign country [called Artsakh] with its own
army, elected officials and parliament. But it still hasn't been recognized by any country
other than Armenia and is still classified as one of the "frozen conflicts" in the region,
along with the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia.
But this "frozen conflict" may soon heat up, if you believe what Azerbaijan's
playboy/gambling addict/president, Ilham Aliyev, says. Not that Azerbaijanis should get too
excited about another war: If Armenians are still the fighters they were ten years ago, then
statistically, it's the Azeris who'll do most of the dying. While matched evenly in soldiers,
the Azeris had double the amount of heavy artillery, armored vehicles, and tanks than the
Armenians; but when it was over, the Azeri body count was three times higher then that of the
Armenians. Azeri casualties stood at 17,000. The Armenians only lost 6,000. And that's not
even counting the remaining Azeri civilians the Armenians ethnically cleansed.
Since the strategically-important Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline opened up, pumping Caspian Sea
oil to the West via Turkey, the Azeri president has been making open threats about reclaiming
Nagorno-Karabakh by force. The $10 billion in oil revenues he expects to earn per year once
the pipeline is fully operational is going to his head. $10 billion might not seem that much
-- but for Azerbaijan it constitutes a 30% spike in GDP. In every single interview, Aliyev
can't even mention the pipeline project without veering onto the subject of "resolving" the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Aliyev started spending the oil cash even before the oil started flowing and announced an
immediate doubling of military spending. A little later he announced the doubling of all
military salaries. Aliyev's generals aren't squeamish about bragging that by next year their
military budget will be $1.2 billion, or about Armenia's entire federal budget.
Over the next 14 years the war that Yasha Levine foresaw in 2006 did not happen. That it was
launched now points to an important change. In July another border skirmish broke out for still
unknown reasons. Then Turkey
stepped in :
Following the July conflict Turkey's involvement became much deeper than it had previously
been, with unprecedentedly bellicose rhetoric coming from Ankara and repeated high-level
visits between the two sides. Ankara appeared to see the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict as yet
another arena in which to exercise its growing foreign policy ambitions, while appealing to a
nationalist, anti-Armenian bloc in Turkey's domestic politics.
Turkey's tighter embrace, in turn, gave Baku the confidence to take a tougher line against
Russia, Armenia's closest ally in the conflict but which maintains close ties with both
countries. Azerbaijan heavily publicized (still unconfirmed) reports about large Russian
weapons shipments to Armenia just following the fighting, and President Ilham Aliyev
personally complained to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.
In August, Turkey and Azerbaijan completed two weeks of joint air and land military
exercises, including in the Azerbaijani enclave of Naxcivan. Some observers have questioned
whether Turkey left behind military equipment or even a contingent of troops.
The potential for robust Turkish involvement in the conflict is being watched closely by
Russia, which is already on opposing sides with the NATO member in conflicts in Libya and
Syria.
Russia sells weapons to both Azerbaijan and Armenia, but has a military base in Armenia
and favors that strategic partnership.
Azerbaijan has bought drones from Turkey and Israel and there are rumors that they are flown
by Turkish and Israeli personal. Turkey also hired
2,000 to 4,000 Sunni Jihadis from Syria to fight for the Shia Azerbaijan. A dozen of them
were already
killed on the first day of the war. One wonders how long they will be willing to be used as
cannon fodder by the otherwise hated Shia.
There were additional rumors that there are Turkish fighter jets in Azerbaijan while Turkish
spy planes look
at the air-space over Armenia from its western border.
The immediate Azerbaijani war aim is to take the
two districts Fizuli and Jabrayil in south-eastern corner of the Armenian held land:
While the core of the conflict between the two sides is the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh,
Fuzuli and Jabrayil are two of the seven districts surrounding Karabakh that Armenian forces
occupy as well. Those districts, which were almost entirely populated by ethnic Azerbaijanis
before the war, were home to the large majority of the more than 600,000 Azerbaijanis
displaced in the conflict.
While there has been some modest settlement by Armenians into some of the occupied
territories, Fuzuli and Jabrayil remain nearly entirely unpopulated.
The two districts have good farm land and Armenia, already poor, will want to keep them. It
certainly is putting up a strong fight over them.
The war has not progressed well for Azerbaijan. It has already lost dozens of tanks (vid) and hundreds
of soldiers. Internet access in the country has been completely blocked to hide the losses.
The losses do not hinder Erdogan's scribes to already
write of victory :
Defending Azerbaijan is defending the homeland. This is our political identity and conscious.
Our geopolitical mind and defense strategies are no different. Always remember, "homeland" is
a very broad concept for us!
We are not making a simple exaggeration when we say "History has been reset." We are
expecting a victory from the Caucasus as well!
Well ...
An hour ago the Armenian government
said that Turkey shot down one of its planes:
Armenia says one of its fighter jets was shot down by a Turkish jet, in a major escalation in
the conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.
The Armenian foreign ministry said the pilot of the Soviet-made SU-25 died after being hit
by the Turkish F-16 in Armenian air space .
Turkey, which is backing Azerbaijan in the conflict, has denied the claim.
...
Azerbaijan has repeatedly stated that its air force does not have F-16 fighter jets. However,
Turkey does.
A Turkish attack within Armenian borders would trigger the Collective Security
Treaty which obligates Russia and others to defend Armenia.
A Russian entry into the war would give Erdogan a serious headache.
But that might not even be his worst problem. The Turkish economy is shrinking, the Central
Bank has only little hard currency left, inflation is hight and the Turkish Lira continues to
fall. Today it hit a new record low .
Azerbaijan has quite a bit of oil money and may be able to help Erdogan. Money may indeed be
a part of Erdogan's motivation to take part in this war.
Russia will certainly not jump head first into the conflict. It will be very careful to not
over-extend itself and to thereby fall into a U.S. laid trap.
Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from Western and Russian sources, this report
examines Russia's economic, political, and military vulnerabilities and anxieties. It then
analyzes potential policy options to exploit them -- ideologically, economically,
geopolitically, and militarily (including air and space, maritime, land, and multidomain
options).
As one option the report discussed to over-extend
Russia (pdf) in the Caucasus:
The United States could extend Russia in the Caucasus in two ways. First, the United States
could push for a closer NATO relation-ship with Georgia and Azerbaijan, likely leading Russia
to strengthen its military presence in South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Armenia, and southern Russia.
Alternatively, the United States could try to induce Armenia to break with Russia.
Although a long-standing Russian partner, Armenia has also developed ties with the West: It
provides troops to NATO-led operations in Afghanistan and is a member of NATO's Partnership
for Peace, and it also recently agreed to strengthen its political ties with the EU. The
United States might try to encourage Armenia to move fully into the NATO orbit. If the United
States were to succeed in this policy, then Russia might be forced to withdraw from its army
base at Gyumri and an army and air base near Yerevan (currently leased until 2044), and
divert even more resources to its Southern Military District.
The RAND report gives those options only a poor chance to succeed. But that does not not
mean that the U.S. would not try to create some additional problems in Russia's southern near
abroad. It may have given its NATO ally Turkey a signal that it would not mind if Erdogan gives
Aliyev a helping hand and jumps into anther war against Russia.
Unless Armenian core land is seriously attacked Russia will likely stay aside. It will help
Armenia with intelligence and equipment flown in through Iran. It will continue to talk with
both sides and will try to arrange a ceasefire.
Pressing Azerbaijan into one will first require some significant Armenian successes against
the invading forces. Thirty years agon the Armenians proved to be far better soldiers than the
Azeris. From what one can gain from social media material that seems to still be the case. It
will be the decisive element for the outcome of this conflict.
Posted by b on September 29, 2020 at 18:04 UTC | Permalink
div> As much as I appreciate b's conflict sitreps, I sure hope this one does not
become a recurring one..
As I reported last week, the Armenians were one of the international participants in recent
military exercises held in the Caucus region, and they frequently train with Russian troops
as CSTO members. Neither the Azeris or Armenians can really afford a conflict, although the
former have the better economic basis and have done a better job dealing with COVID. Because
of their history, Armenians are better and more tenacious in combat. Until Nagorno-Karabakh
is resolved, it will be exploited by the Outlaw US Empire.
The trouble with this kind of intimate geography, is that it is very tempting to operate
longer-range weapons or drones from the 'uncontested' portion of each country's territory,
since each home territory is theoretically out of bounds of the conflict.
The main meaningful response to a long-range or unmanned attack, targeting the source,
could then be used to blame the other side for any escalation. It seems Azerbaijan is more
comfortable with this at the moment. Assuming they end up occupying more of the contested
territory, they will end up on the receiving end of the same pattern, but either way the
result would be the same.
Besides the muddled geopolitics and heartbreaking history, it makes for a relevant study
in the state of modern drone and anti-drone systems, which will only increase in significance
going forward, as guidance systems, software integration,
networked/relay-based-communications and hard-to-detect point-to-point radio or IR comms are
all more accessible now. (for example, what would you do if you had the capacity to make ~10
million of the things a year)
Meanwhile, the radical blue ticks need some way to seem like they are superior to plebs who
might be inclined to take Armenia's side. It's all very complicated, both sides are just as
wrong you see!
"1 No side has a monopoly of justice. Both sides have historical claims to Karabakh. It
was the site of a medieval Armenian kingdom in the 12th century and an Azerbaijani (Persian
Turkic Shia) khanate in the 18th c. Both peoples have lived together here, mostly
peacefully."
But the people never changed, they were Armenian before and after the very brief period of
being a part of that Khanate (75 years, he left this out) against their will. It's all the
more surreal since the guy making the argument that 75 years of being under somebody's rule
300 years ago makes you theirs forever.
It's all the more surreal given the writers own father is from Amsterdam given.
I don't see anyone suggesting Spain has legitimate claims on Flanders and the
Netherlands.
It must be hard for bluechecks because their vaunted 'rules-based international order'
such it might ever have been said to exist with constant violation without consequence by
powerful countries is the source of the problem. Azerbaijan is only still after this
territory based on the thin logic that despite being 85-90% Armenian at it's lowest point in
the last 250 years and 100% Armenian today and being totally separated from Azerbaijan
politically, the UN still considers it's de jure Azerbaijan. The map says it's
Azerbaijan!
It is surprising seeing Erdogan who is a Muslim Brotherhood fanatic supporting a mostly Shia
Muslim country of Azerbaijan.
May be Persia should get involved to get back the land it lost during the Persian-Russo wars
!
B, it is good to see you reporting on matters that are within your area of expertise. Your
reporting on conflicts of this kind is invaluable, and I always follow your reports with
great interest.
I wish I could say the same for your recent post about Covid19, but there are aspects of
that post that are unfortunate. It is clear, for example, that you have not been following
the latest work on cross-reactive immunity--that is, the evidence that people who have not
yet been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 nevertheless have some immunity to it, due to exposure to
other corona-viruses. Nor is your overall analysis of the actual lethality of the disease
convincing--you seem to be unaware of the vast difference between young people and children,
who almost never die of Covid19, versus the elderly, who are much at risk. This has great
implications for what policies are best in dealing with the disease.
Yes NK was historically Arm going back forever. Nevertheless, the geography made defending
it impossible without occupying adjacent areas which as far as I know, were Azeri in modern
times. There are few happy answers to be found here.
As far as biases are concerned, deWaal is giving the interview to Al Jazeera, and the
network is (not surprisingly) somewhat more sympathetic to Turkish and therefore Azeri
statements on the matter, though they typically do a better job keeping a professional facade
than domestic (US) media at least. But that gives a hint.
Excellent couple of articles, 'b'. You are really on form. Thanks.
Think you are spot on regarding money and deflection. What we've seen recently from
Erdogan is vast expenditure in construction - unnecessary pandemic hospitals with
extortionate rental agreements to be met by the local authorities - and in technology - the
latest TechnoFest headed by his other 'damat' advertised significant projects to be funded by
the state, and of course oil and military: In these sectors nepotism and cronyism rule. it is
those companies close to Erdogan that reap very significant benefits. So, any earnings that
can be gleaned from Aliyev are very welcome I am sure.
The other aspect is deflection from a series of foreign policy failures, and several
serious domestic failures, one being the management of Covid currently and its obvious
manipulations and the abject failure of the online education system in which it is estimated
between 35 and 50 percent of pupils are NOT participating. The others being the economy as
'b' alluded to and the failed Greek, Libyan and Syrian situations. Other than that, the
political ground does not favour Erdogan at all and he is terrified of losing his 2023
deadline and therefore desperate to win back more of the electorate.
Turks talks about Turkey and Azerbaijan as One People, Two states - the Azeris do not say
the same. But it is a sign of just how important this is to Turks. As 'b' has mentioned, the
Turkish media is already in faitytale / victory mode - the last dreamt up report I saw
claimed that PKK were moving from Syria to Iraq and into Armenia to fight against Azeris -
and people are buying it, as they always do. Nationalism is very big in Turkey. There's a
reason why criticising a military campaign is considered a crime!
I was tempted to think that this 'conflict' would go the way of every other contrived
foreign policy foray this year, but Aliyev and Erdogan may be out to save each other's
political lives here in which case we need to consider what they're fighting to defend - very
wealthy authoritarian 'mafia states'. I do not think that Turkey would decide to push Russia
too far unless it had NATO or US backing because Turkey's economy and regional influence are
very dependent on Russia. So, I think this will be a limited show-piece that may score some
territory. What is certain is that in both Turkey and Azerbaijan, victory is already
guaranteed by the media! Does that imply a short 'conflict'?
Another aspect to remember is Iran. it has very good and important relations with both
Azerbaijan and Armenia and would no doubt fully back any Russian intervention be it
diplomatic or otherwise. It has also offered to mediate between the two. The Nagorno-Karabakh
area is very important to Iran.
So many fuses, so little time with desperate madmen on the march. As the good professor said,
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought
with sticks and stones." WWIII ain't your grandfather's World War.
R.A.
The swprs has been a constant source of Covid-19 scepticism from the outset. It is not
balanced and is full of cherry picking about its sources and analysis. It is a very serious
error to focus entirely on mortality in Covid 19 and its major effect on older people. It
does mean premature death for many. But even more seriously Covid-19 causes serious morbidity
and together with a high infectious rate leads to very sharp swamping of health systems,
major loss of front line workers because of illness and serious health and economic effects
independent of the mortality. Focussing on mortality of elderly only is a narrow view and
ignores why Covid 19 is such a serious pandemic.
Was lacking some of the details and depth of B's report but it was clear Erdogan is running
point on another Nato led shit sandwich on Russia's doorstep and a blatant 'damned if you do,
damned if you don't' trap laid out for Putin.
What's the bet if Russia supports Armenia the media will paint this as 'Russian
aggression' on poor Azerbaijan and an invasion of their sovereign territory? The region is
technically still part of Azerbaijan. Yet when all the first videos showed Azeri drones
striking Armenian tanks in defensive dugouts, while Armenian footage showed ATGM's striking
Azeri armour maneuvering in open fields, it doesn't take a genius to work out who the
aggressor was... but facts should never get in the way of a good narrative when it comes to
Nato..
Another frozen conflict would be just the ticket to drain more resources from Russia, not
to mention, the potential for instability and refugees right on Iran's doorstep would be too
much for the US not to want to invest in. Combine that with Erdogan's megalomania, and he'll
be happy to add 15% on all munitions charged to Azerbaijan to help plug some of his budget
holes, no doubt.
Luckily I'm no military strategist, but when i hear things like this i can't help wonder
if some good old 'domestic terrorism' or missiles flying into Baku, Washington or Istanbul
are just what is needed for these psychopaths to be brought to the negotiating table nice and
early and avoid a lot of human misery... It is just crazy to think we have leaders who
actually start wars in order to poke Russia in the eye... one wonders, since they know
exactly who is doing what and why, what sort of payback that may bring one day.
There is no doubt that Nagorno-Karabakh is traditionally part of Azerbaijan and only got
claimed by Armenia after a surfeit of Armenians invaded the territory since the end of WW1.
All in all a very similar situation to that which developed in Serbia vis a vis the invasion
of Kosovo by Albanians.
MOA has consistently stood against the internationally illegal Kosovo enclave, so why the
contradiction with Nagorno-Karabakh?
Surely it cannot be because of ideological reasons i.e. Armenia is 'good guys' &
Azerbaijan are bad guys? That is precisely the type of logical inconsistency which causes
wars.
Azerbaijan is in a tough enough situation with Armenia block the creation of a contiguous
nation with Armenia's takeover of the south of Azerbaijan up to the Iranian border. If you
look at the first map provided you will see an unlabelled black blob up against the Iranian
border a part of Azerbaijan which has been deliberately isolated by Armenia from the rest of
Azerbaijan.
This report sounds like something out of the NYT or Guardian next you'll be claiming with
zero evidence that there are Turkey funded terrorists brought in from Idlib just as the
guardian has been claiming.
Another motivation for Ottoman Sultan wannabe Erdogan may be the possibility of extending
Turkish influence (and by implication his and his family's) through Azerbaijan and the
Caspian Sea into Central Asia all the way to and into ... Xinjiang in NW China, with the
potential for Uyghur terrorists, nurtured by Turkish propaganda, money and arms, to get a
free ride through Central Asia and straight into any future conflict zones Turkey might want
to open up in Iranian Azerbaijan and all Iran's northern and eastern border areas with
Turkmenistan and Afghanistan.
Of course this will have US, UK, EU (possibly) and Israeli blessing if it means Turkey
will have to do most of the heavy lifting of money transactions.
thanks b.... seeing erdogan involved here makes sense.. at some point, someone is going to
take him out to bring peace back to the area.... until then he is a useful tool..
@ debs....thanks for your comments.. perhaps b will respond to them?? i agree with et tu,
the narrative the msm will spin here will tell us a lot..
@Jen
If I remember rightly, and I'll try to find the reports, it was claimed back in July that
Erdogan had offered to send Syrian militias to help defend Azerbaijan.
What makes you think the claim is unfounded?
The jihadists left in N.Syria are a serious problem for Turkey, so it would nake perfect
sense to try to 'liquidate' them in contrived 'conflicts'.
When did that "invasion of Kosovo by Albanians" did happen? You seem so pretty sure of it
that it makes me wonder if you are the creator of history itself, so you just invented it,
and believe it.
The solution would be to give back the adjacent territories that border Azerbaijan to
Azerbaijan and maybe pay some kind of nominal compensation to the displaced in return for
normalisation. They are to my knowledge much like parts of the buffer zone in Cyprus, full of
abandoned towns and villages. (Some of which you can see tanks using for cover in the
videos)
But the Caucuses are the Caucuses are grudges are grudges. Can't turn back the clock so
it's all or nothing, one side loses and one side wins.
Then you have all the exclaves and enclaves to deal with, which ironically, haven't become
an issue yet at all, probably because it would involve attacks on Armenia proper. Though
there has already been one strike in Armenia proper of a bus that was set to carry Armenian
solders.
1. It is obvious that the current aggravation was not accidental, but prepared in advance.
2. Possible goals for Turkey:
> Anchoring Turkey in Azerbaijan - the creation of full-fledged turkish military
bases.
> Inclusion of Azerbaijan in the Turkish orbit of influence (thesis "two countries -
one nation", in which Turkey assumes supremacy) within the framework of the concept of
neo-Ottomanism and (pseudo-)leadership of Turkey in the Turkic world.
> Economic goals and energy projects (Azerbaijani oil, gas) as part of the Turkish plan
to turn the country into an energy supplier.
> Given the circumstances (Ukrainian black hole, Belarusian problem, coronavirus,
spectacle with Navalny, threat to Nord Stream-2 etc), involve Russia in the
Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, thereby tying Russia's hands in the Caucasus direction in
order to act more freely and boldly in other theaters (the Mediterranean conflict with
Greece, Syria, Libya...), given the problematic position of Turkey (simultaneous war on
several fronts and the almost complete absence of assistants/allies). In this situation, the
Nagorno-Karabakh leverage/'trump card' in the hands of Turkey would be useful for
negotiations with Russia.
The latter assumption is probably the main one.
@Debsisdead, #16
There is no doubt that Nagorno-Karabakh is traditionally part of Azerbaijan
Funny.
Actually, this territory - Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as Armenia and Azerbaijan - have been
the territory (or "property", if you will) of Russia for the last 200-250 years.
Interesting historic fact. As long as the centre (USSR) held, the facts on the ground held,
much like the other areas of conflicts in Georgia, Ukraine and Transnistria. With the end of
the USSR, everything changed. This is what Putin meant when he called the breakup of the USSR
as disaster. And NATO will continue to poke a stick at these vulnerabilities. Are the people
of Armenia really that stupid that they see anything positive from joining NATO? Like that
will protect them against Turkey. They can see how Greece is treated. Hopefully this conflict
will put to bed any thought of Armenia being pried away from Russia.
Stalin's Legacy: The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict
Nagorno-Karabakh is a highly contested, landlocked region in the South Caucasus of the
former Soviet Union. The present-day conflict has its roots in the decisions made by Joseph
Stalin when he was the acting Commissar of Nationalities for the Soviet Union during the
early 1920s. In April 1920, Azerbaijan was taken over by the Bolsheviks; Armenia and Georgia
were taken over in 1921. To garner public support, the Bolsheviks promised Karabakh to
Armenia. At the same time, in order to placate Turkey, the Soviet Union agreed to a division
under which Karabakh would be under the control of Azerbaijan. With the Soviet Union firmly
in control of the region, the conflict over the region died down for several decades.
As #12 seems to be implying as well, b is ignoring this region is the backyard of another
regional powerhouse: Iran.
Any involvement from the US in Iran's backguard will be gladly countertargeted so that
automatically means Turkey has very big ambitions to join this battle. This could very well
end up in straight war if the diplomatic channels of mainly Russia are not effective
enough..
I've read somewhere that only English wankers call Iran "Persia". Iran lost those
territories when the Turkic Qajar incompetents were ruling Iran (in a fashion).
It is informative to look into Qajar Iran. They somehow managed to take a Safavid (also
Turkic) Iran from a fairly respectable state to the lowest state that Iran has likely been in
its entire 3000+ year history. It is amazing what the Pahlavis managed to do to resurrect
Iran in the short 50 turbulent years a Persian dynasty finally got to run Iran after
centuries.
As to Sultan of Turkey making noises about Azar (Fire) PaadGaan (Guardians) being the
homeland of the 'multi-faceted' spawn of the displaced Mongols of Turkistan, he can go and
suck the Tsar of All Russians and Minions prick, again.
--
Interesting that "B" claims (without any proof whatsoever) that Russia intends to use Iran
as a channel to transport arms to Armenia. Iran's media already has come out and has denied
reports by "foreign media" to say such things. I guess that includes you, Moon Of
Alabama.
--
Also interesting that the apparently very capable Turkish drone being used is not
discussed here at Moon of Alabama. When did this place turn into the New York Times? What's
next, B, a Pulitzer?
Since the bar keep is not sharing links to vidoes released by Azerbaijan's military
showing multiple distinct drone hits on Armenian armour, then I won't either. But it is just
a few clicks away.
--
Finally, this situation is a touchy one for Iran, aka as "Persia" amongst the wankers and
related sorts. Will the "Muslim" revolutionaries, the children of Ayatollah cum Imam of
"Persians" (lol) yet again choose infidels as waali, if they think this will permit them to
warm the throne of Jamshid and the Hidden Imam and wisely rule and chart the destiny of
"Persians"? The answer to that is answered by noting that no one has ever accused the Mullahs
of "Persia" to be impractical men. Unholy, sure, some. But impractical, estaghforallah!
"..Actually, this territory - Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as Armenia and Azerbaijan - have been
the territory (or "property", if you will) of Russia for the last 200-250 years." alaff@22
A very good point. These countries have never been independent states. In 1918, under
western influence, and led by mensheviks Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan formed the
Trans-Caucasian Republic. My guess is that by the end of the Soviet era secularism dominated
all three societies and religious disputes were largely forgotten.
One historical grudge very much alive is that of the Armenian genocide at the hands of the
Turks, a century ago.
Sorry grump one, I just got back from my wednesday morning doctor's run where I pick up some
locals from around the area & run them to the Drs in town.
I hope that this conflict won't get characterised as a religious conflict, because that
isn't really what it is about.
Armenians fled east during WW1 in direct response to the genocidal attacks on Armenians by
Turks, so that should be easy eh? Blame the Turks, but it isn't that easy because of the
French & Englanders machinations when sequestering all the assets of the Ottoman
empire.
Right the way through WW1 which was at heart a war over assets for empires, even the spark
that lit the fuse was caused by the Austro-Hungarian Empire's lust for grabbing Serbia &
including it in their repressive empire, all the politicians & bureaucrats to empire of
the 'big' nations, spent a lot more time and energy divvying up their hoped for imperial
gains, than they ever spent on concern about the generation of young men being forced through
the meat grinders.
There were 3 big nations on the winning side France, England & Russia, yet
Sykes Picot is a secret agreement between only two of the triumvirate. Many suppose this
is because Russia pulled out of WW1 after the October revolution, that is not correct as this
secret agreement was signed in May 1916, 18 months before the Bolshevik soviet uprising.
England & France were doing the dirty on Russia even while the Tsar was the
bossfella.
Perfidious Albion seems to be the one most responsible as it has always claimed that a
similarly secret deal England made with Russia, unbeknownst to France had been completed. A
deal whereby England would grab the oil rich Mesopotamia & all the rest of Arabian
peninsular in return for Russia getting Constantinople and most of Anatolia.
That seems unlikely since England and France had already spilt the blood of 213,980
French, English Australian, New Zealand & Canadian troops on the Dardanelles in pursuit of an
invasion and eventual takeover of Constantinople which england had begun planning since back
in 1905! Long before WW1. Winston Churchill in particular had been advocating this for more
than a decade because he wanted to deny Russia easy access to the mediterranean.
A lie was told to the fatally foolish Tsar - it was that the anglo-french invasion of
southern Turkey was to be a distraction that would require Turkey & Germany/Austria to
divert troops from the eastern front thereby relieving pressure on Imperial Russia's
armies.
So what? How does that effect Nagorno-Karabakh? Well it does, because after england
screwed up at the Dardanelles, they then encouraged Armenians to take up arms against the
Ottomans, all the while knowing that despite promises to the contrary, if the Armenians came
unstuck against the 'easybeat' Turks, there would be no way of helping the Armenians out.
That is what happened of course. Kemal Attaturk the bloke who had overseen Gallipoli &
england's send off was sent to oversee the fight against Armenian guerillas and the Armenians
got monstered, so fled eastwards some as far as into the mountains of Nagorno-Karabakh.
The situation is even more complicated by the fact that after WW1 ended and elites all
over europe were crazed with anxiety about a 'red' takeover of Europe, 'the west' kicked up
even more trouble. By financing a mob oops sorry, army, of so-called white russians to resist
the USSR in the South Western Caucasus, it meant that the USSR was unable to exert full
control of the region for nearly 5 years. This is why as Tom says at #24 it wasn't until 1921
that the Soviet Union could credibly promise Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia, a blatant bribe to
encourage the warring parties to talk not shoot, but really it was more like 1923 when the
USSR got total control of the region.
I point out the mess that previous interference has caused because it is vital that
history not repeat itself in that regard. If it does, then all that will result will be a
conflict held in abeyance for a time until it flares up again.
There are two issues people & geography, maybe the boss of Azerbaijan is an arsehole
who is trying to get back onside with Azerbaijanis by cranking up a conflict that is close to
the hearts of most citizens because every time they look at a map they are confronted by the
injustice of their nation cleaved in two. His alleged arseholery does not diminish the
genuine injustice Azerbaijanis feel in their bones.
That is one group of people, the other group are the relatively small number of Armenians
squatting illegally on Azerbaijani land.
The easiest way to fix the geography & people issue is for those Armenians to be
relocated into decent accommodation within Armenia and return Nagorno-Karabakh plus a land
corridor that rejoins Azerbaijan once again.
It will be complex to resolve as there will also be an issue with Armenians who have occupied
the space between the two parts of Azerbaijan, but however much it costs, that is bound to be
less than the cost of airplanes, rockets & artillery shells that will be expended keeping
the conflict bubbling away.
Turkish officials are preparing for the worst case scenario as talks in Ankara made clear
that Moscow doesn't want a new deal
####
This is a Turkey sympathetic piece but may be one reason for current events between
Armenia and Azerbaidjan. As for Syria, Turkey has been claiming to keep the north/Idlib under
control which is has until the last few weeks at it has used the previous time to reinforce
its military presence ('observation posts') – vis Vinyard the Saker – and now
claims it is not reponsible and its not fair that Russia reacts to attacks by its re-dressed
(literally) jihadists. Turkey's preference is of course to do nothing despite the all the
attacks, and that in itself explains a lot. Turkey is now publicly putting out its argument
in advance that it is 'Russia wot broke the agreement' and thus 'we are not responsible for
any of the consequences.' Erd O'Grand is due another significant spanking. Would he call NATO
to his defense as he did before? Certainly. Will it happen? No. Not to mention his current
intreagues around Cyprus and pissing of the French, Greeks and others. Trouble t'mill.
Despite Turkey's efforts to maintain the status quo in Idlib, a Russian-backed Syrian
assault seems increasingly likely.
####
In short, Turkey has not kept up its side of the deal of bringing the rebels under control
and the supposed opening and joint patrols of the M4 & M5 highways has been suspended by
Russia because of the attacks by rebadged jihadis. Turkey has clearly used the agreement to
simply buy time for another 'cunning plan' and as no interest in fulfiling the agreement with
Russia. The latter's patience is almost gone.
Today, the Arctic has increasingly become identified as a domain of great prosperity
and cooperation amongst world civilizations on the one side and a domain of confrontation and
war on the other.
In 2007, the Russian government first voiced its support for the construction of the
Bering Strait rail tunnel connecting the Americas with the Eurasian continent- a policy which
has taken on new life in 2020 as Putin's Great Arctic Development strategy has wedded itself
to the northern extension of the Belt and Road Initiative (dubbed the Polar Silk Road). In
2011, the Russian government re-stated its pledge to build the $64 billion project .
####
On September 26, President Trump announced that a long-overdue project would receive
Federal support which involves connecting Alaska for the first time with Canada and the lower
48 states via a 2570 km railway.
In his Tweet announcing the project, Trump said:
####
I'd never read about the sale of Alaska to America by Russia in any detail before but just
by looking at the map it was clear that it made sense. Indefensible against a rapidly growing
country, so sell early for a good price or lose it and get nothing.
As for Ehret's hypothesis, we know that t-Rump sees things in a deal oriented way and not
simply 'You must be destroyed (TM)' way, though his methods of reaching such deals 'Maximum
Pressure (TM)' are none too bright and result in less than a normally negotiated deal. But,
if we look at the ends rather than the means, improving trade links is surely to America's
(and others) advantage.
One thing that does strike me from the maps of the proposed increased US-Asia links is
that having those function normally is not compatible with the current strategic goal of
trying to contain China. So, what is the point of the US Pacific Fleet? Just Free-Dumb of
Navigation (FONOPS) cruises for pensioners?
Update (1712ET): Online sleuths such as The Last Refuge are already connecting dots between
when the Trump-Russia allegations surfaced and the newly released briefing timeline
.
TheLastRefuge
@TheLastRefuge2 ·
Sep 29, 2020 This is additionally important for a specific reference point. Clinton ally,
and former acting CIA Director Mike Morell first published the Clinton created Russia narrative
(in the New York Times) less than a week after this July 26, 2016, briefing by Brennan.
The Reckoning @sethjlevy This conversation between
@jaketapper and
@RobbyMook happened on July 25th. The Reckoning @sethjlevy On day 1 of the Democrat
Convention as Wikileaks began their DNC releases Mook's interview uses the release to begin
spinning the Trump Russia tale. This was planned, prepared, purposeful and the beginning of one
of the most damaging psy op disinformation campaigns in US history.
https://twitter.com/sethjlevy/status/963977316547399680?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1311019881039618049%7Ctwgr%5Eshare_3&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fus-intelligence-investigated-hillary-clinton-over-alleged-plan-smear-trump-russia
Sean Davis @seanmdav ·
Sep 29, 2020 Replying to @seanmdav Today's declassification confirms that from the
beginning, the FBI knew its anti-Trump investigation was based entirely on Russian
disinformation. Brennan and Comey were personally warned. They responded by fabricating
evidence and defrauding the courts. https:// judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/
09-29-20_Letter%20to%20Sen.%20Graham_Declassification%20of%20FBI's%20Crossfire%20Hurricane%20Investigations_20-00912_U_SIGNED-FINAL.pdf
BenTallmadge @BenKTallmadge https:// twitter.com/benktallmadge/
status/1310676483501768705?s=21 BenTallmadge @BenKTallmadge Replying to @BenKTallmadge
Alexander Vindman was working at thé US embassy in Moscow when the wife of former mayor
wired $3.5M to Hunter Biden, right before Russia took Crimea H/t @grabaroot https://
twitter.com/playstrumpcard /status/1310648949393502214?s=21 https:// twitter.com/playstrumpcard
/status/1310648949393502214
Meanwhile, this is being downplayed by intelligence officials as Russian disinformation,
which DNI Ratcliffe has refuted.
Chuck Ross @ChuckRossDC · 3h Intel officials came out
within minutes to claim Russian disinfo in the Ratcliffe letter. We didn't find out for nearly
three years that Russian disinfo might have been in the dossier.
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-4&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1311056956023595009&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fus-intelligence-investigated-hillary-clinton-over-alleged-plan-smear-trump-russia&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px
Jeremy Herb @jeremyherb New statement from Ratcliffe on unverified Russian intel: "To be
clear, this is not Russian disinformation and has not been assessed as such by the Intelligence
Community. I'll be briefing Congress on the sensitive sources and methods by which it was
obtained in the coming days."
5:35 PM · Sep 29, 2020
* * *
On September 7, 2016, US intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to
former FBI officials James Comey and Peter Strzok concerning allegations that Hillary Clinton
approved a plan to smear then-candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Russian President Vladimir
Putin and Russian hackers , according to information given to Sen. Lindsey Graham by the
Director of National Intelligence.
According to Fox News' Chad Pergram, "In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained
insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary
Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate
Donald Trump," after one of Clinton's foreign policy advisers proposed vilifying Trump "by
stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services."
Chad Pergram @ChadPergram ·
Sep 29, 2020 Replying to @ChadPergram 5) DNI info to Grahm: On 07 September 2016, U.S.
intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to FBI Director James Comey and
Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok regarding 'U.S. Presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton's approval of a plan..
Chad Pergram @ChadPergram 6) DNI info to Graham:...concerning U.S. Presidential candidate
Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the
public from her use of a private mail server.'"
2:51 PM · Sep 29, 2020
In response to your request for Intelligence Community (IC) information related to the
Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Crossfire Hurricane Investigation, I have declassified
the following:
In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence
analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan
to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and
the Russians' hacking of the Democratic National Committee. The IC docs not know the accuracy
of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect
exaggeration or fabrication.
According to his handwritten notes, former Central Intelligence Agency Director Brennan
subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the
intelligence, including the "alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26. 2016 of a proposal
from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal
claiming interference by Russian security services."
On 07 September 2016. U.S. intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to FBI
Director James Comey and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok
regarding "U.S. Presidential candidate I lillary Clinton's approval of a plan concerning U.S.
Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of
distracting the public from her use of a private mail server."
As referenced in his 24 September 2020 letter to your Committee, Attorney General Ban has
advised that the disclosure of this information will not interfere with ongoing Department of
Justice investigations. Additional declassification and public disclosure of related
intelligence remains under consideration; however, the IC welcomes the opportunity to provide a
classified briefing with further detail at your convenience.
Respectfully,
i RatcliiTc
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-8&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1311021129981734912&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fus-intelligence-investigated-hillary-clinton-over-alleged-plan-smear-trump-russia&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px
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Wikileaks
In 2017, it was claimed that the "blame Russia" plan was hatched "within twenty-four hours"
of Clinton losing the election - while the US intelligence investigation predates that by
several months.
New book by 'Shattered' by Clinton insiders reveals that "blame Russia" plan was hatched
"within twenty-four hours" of election loss.
The authors detail how Clinton went out of her way to pass blame for her stunning loss on
"Comey and Russia."
"She wants to make sure all these narratives get spun the right way," a longtime Clinton
confidant is quoted as saying.
The book further highlights how Clinton's Russia-blame-game was a plan hatched by senior
campaign staffers John Podesta and Robbv Mook. less than "within twenty-fourhours" after she
conceded:
That strategy had been set within twenty -four hours of her concession speech. Mook and
Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case
that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple ofhours, with Shake Shack
containers littering the room, they went over the script theywould pitch to the press and
the public. Already. Russian hacking was the centerpieceof the argument.
The Clinton camp settled on a two-pronged plan -- pushing the press to cover how"Russian
hacking was the major unreported story of the campaign, overshadowed by thecontents of stolen
e-mails and Hillary*s own private-server imbroglio.'' while"hammering the media for focusing
so intently on the investigation into her e-mail, whichhad created a cloud over her candidacy
." the authors wrote.
"... The DemoRats have never been a party dedicated to peace; the only ones thinking that are the walking bong-holes who assuage their cognitive dissonance by telling themselves that. Both the demorats and their willing accomplices 'across the aisle' have led us into constant war for nearly eight decades. Lilliputian Big enders and Little enders all. ..."
"... Screw the war mongers and the MIC. ..."
"... If you read the article, it's obvious that [neo]liberals/whores are the apogee of hypocrisy. ..."
"... Perpetual war is about $$$. It knows no party. Never has and never will. ..."
Feral, yes; rabid, absolutely; smart... not so much. Why is anyone surprised?
The DemoRats have never been a party dedicated
to peace; the only ones thinking that are the walking bong-holes who assuage their cognitive dissonance by telling themselves
that. Both the demorats and their willing accomplices 'across the aisle' have led us into constant war for nearly eight decades.
Lilliputian Big enders and Little enders all.
Yup. It's always about the money. As Fitts would say, that screeching you hear is the cash flow drying up for the rentiers.
The murdering of women and children be damned. Hillary's demonic cackle is but the grotesque cherry on top:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y
Here's what Matt hopes you don't remember: When the cancel mob came for him, he was the
"upper class Twitter Robespierre" ratting on his colleagues.
Yasha Levine Sep 18
Between the pandemic, the economic collapse, the fires and the toxic fumes, and the
fact that I'm currently fighting an eviction, I know there are much more pressing issues to
get worked up about these days. But as someone who got his start in journalism at The eXile
and who has been on the receiving end of our "cancel culture" so many times I lost count, I
can't let it go.
####
Plenty more at the link.
There's very much 'don't put one's head above the parapet unnecessarily' about all
this so no wonder Levine feels betrayed. Yes, people change and see things differently later
in life and deal with it in their own ways. Maybe we all live too long .
The eXile also reflected closely what I myself saw and heard first hand while I was
studying in Russia in the mid-1990s, that it bore no resemblance to what the western
journalists were reporting. This on the back of all their lies and willful ignorance during
the break up of Yugoslavia and the subsequent civil wars. It put me off being a journalist
(which was a good thing)!
There's other interesting stuff including by Anatole Lieven in Prospect Magazine which is
stuff familiar and oft discussed by us already.
HSBC allowed fraudsters to transfer millions of dollars around the world even after it
had learned of their scam, leaked secret files show.
Britain's biggest bank moved the money through its US business to HSBC accounts in Hong
Kong in 2013 and 2014.
Its role in the $80m (£62m) fraud is detailed in a leak of documents –
banks' "suspicious activity reports" – that have been called the FinCEN Files.
HSBC says it has always met its legal duties on reporting such activity.
Why is it that the "Free World" has so many corrupt institutions, especially when it comes
to dealing with loadsa lolly?
The West has so many internal financial traitors, who, essentially, are traitors and
deceivers to whole populations of Western free society, and who make it too easy for enemies
of the "Free World" to use the blatant dishonesty and hypocrisy of Western financial
institutions as a glaring example of Western perfidy.
95% of Russians think that all Western financiers are thieves. Just walk around any hell
hole of a Russian shitsville town out in the sticks and you will find that to be true!
And get this!
Clearly distraught about the enormity of this financial swindle perpetrated by HSBC, the
BBC feels it duty bound to point out a Putin connection with this ginormous financial
scam:
He definitely did it! Past tense: completed in the past -- "laundered"
However, in the first line of the body of the article, enter the modal auxiliary verb
"may" in order to indicate probability, and slight probability at that:
One of Vladimir Putin's closest friends may have used Barclays Bank in London to
launder money and dodge sanctions, leaked documents suggest.
And Deutsche Bank was well in on the money laundering scam as well:
FinCEN Files: Deutsche Bank tops list of suspicious transactions
Leaked documents shed a light on Deutsche Bank's central role in facilitating
financial transactions deemed suspicious. Many of these could have enabled the circumvention
of sanctions on Iran and Russia.
Financial intelligence data about the accounts of Russians in American banks has been
published
08:46 21.09.2020 (updated: 09:04 21.09.2020)
MOSCOW, September 21 – RIA Novosti. Cassandra, an international consortium of
investigative journalists, has released classified data from the US Treasury Department for
Combating Financial Crimes (FinCEN) regarding suspicious banking transactions.
According to media reports, the beneficiaries of some transactions are, amongst others,
Russian politicians and businessmen.
The consortium declined to comment on how it got the secret documents. At the same
time, the investigators themselves noted that suspicious transactions do not always indicate
a violation of the law.
An "international consortium", eh?
No explanation of how the data was acquired, eh?
And in any case, big transfers of dough don't necessarily mean that such transfers are
illegal.
So why make an issue out of it?
I wonder if this International Consortium has ever taken a peek at poroshenko's money
transactions and offshore subterfuges?
Oh look!
The address of "Cassandra":
1710 Rhode Island Ave NW | 11th floor
Washington DC 20036 USA
As regards Putin's pal since childhood who "may have used Barclays Bank in London to
launder money and dodge sanctions", Vedomosti reports this morning:
14 minutes ago Rotenberg has called the media data on transactions through a London bank nonsense
Aha! A denial from a Russian -- and a Russian 4×2 to boot!
That can only mean he is guilty as accused.
The data on suspicious transactions carried out by Russian businessmen Arkady and Boris
Rotenberg through the London bank Barclays is nothing more than nonsense, RBC reports with
reference to a representative of Arkady Rotenberg.
"The data on suspicious transactions that Russian businessmen Arkady and Boris
Rotenberg carried out through the London bank Barclays, published by the international
investigative project Cassandra, is nothing more than delusion", the message says.
Representatives of other members of the Rotenberg family said that they did not settle
through British banks and did not directly or indirectly own Ayrton, which is mentioned in
the Cassandra report, the newspaper reports.
Earlier, experts of the international investigation project "Cassandra" published a
report on the results of a study of the documents of the US financial intelligence (FinCEN)
that came at their disposal. Amongst the financial transactions that the banks reporting to
FinCEN found suspicious, in particular, were those of Ayrton Development Limited. The
company, according to the BBC, was deemed by Barclays to be owned by the sanctioned Arkady
Rotenberg. According to the report, 26 transactions carried out in the interests of the
Rotenbergs were classified as suspicious.
Leningrader Arkady Rotenberg was a sambo pal of Putin. He has clearly enjoyed considerable
enrichment during the Putin tyranny.
In 2000, the Evil One created Rosspirtprom, a state-owned enterprise controlling 30% of
Russia's vodka market, and put Rotenberg in control.
In 2001, Rotenberg and his brother founded the SMP bank, which operates in 40 Russian
cities with over 100 branches, more than half of them in the Moscow area. SMP oversees the
operation of more than 900 ATM-machines. SMP bank also became a leading large-diameter gas
pipe supplier.
In 2007, Gazprom rejected an earlier plan to build a 350-mile pipeline and instead paid
Rotenberg $45 billion to lay a 1,500 mile pipeline to the Arctic Circle.
O'Bummer signed an executive order instructing his government to impose sanctions on the
Rotenberg brothers and other close friends of President Putin because of the Russian
"annexation" of the Crimea.
For all his wealth, though, Arkady Rotenberg is not that smart at everything he does: In
2005, Rotenberg married his second wife Natalia Rotenberg, who is about 30 years his junior.
Their two children, Varvara and Arkady, live in the United Kingdom with Natalia. They
divorced in 2015 in the U.K. While the financial details of the divorce are private, the
agreement includes division of the use of a £35 million Surrey mansion and a £8
million apartment in London. The couple's lawyers obtained a secrecy order preventing media
in the U.K. from reporting on the divorce, but the order was overturned on appeal.
And only then, after having assured everyone and everything that the dose of the
terrible poison Novichok was received precisely at home, Mr. Navalny, a dissenting person,
was for some reason not at all afraid of this "irrefutable fact", and barely having opened
his eyelids from a cloudy "comatose" slumber, was already prepared -- almost in his hospital
robe -- to rush back.
To Moscow.
His home country.
Where allegedly, he was almost wiped off the face of the earth by "insidious poison
murderers".
Washington is considering closing its embassy in Iraq, nine months after the US killing
of an Iranian general on Iraqi soil led to protests over what Baghdad called a "violation" of
its sovereignty, according to reports.
Multiple media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and Sky
News, reported on Sunday that US officials told their Iraqi counterparts that Washington will
shut down its operations unless there is an end to rocket attacks on the embassy, which is
located in the heavily-fortified Green Zone in Baghdad.
Sounds more like a possible victory for Iraq and its people. I suspect that there is much
more to the story and the US is pre-emptively seeking a face-saving exit excuse if it were to
come to that.
However, it would be extremely unlikely for the US to abandon the embassy given that it
serves as the headquarters for numerous nefarious operations in Iraq and Iran
The claim that I have read is that this is in response to the USA's assassination of
General Solemani in Lebanon. More precisely the i-Ranian strategy is not per se to cause
American casualties but carry out sustained attacks via proxies on American interest in
i-Rack, i.e. psychological pressure, cost etc. the ultimate goal being the USA leaving i-Rack
as a suitable price for the assassination.I
I've also read (Vinyard the Saker?)that the USA has so far closed some of its smaller and
less defensible outposts but concentrated what remains in fewer better defended bases. The
USA does not want to leave i-Rack militarily and will hang on until it is out of options. The
US embassy leaving i-Rack will not be good enough for i-Ran, but maybe this is the beginning
of some kind of behind the scenes bargaining, though this is hard to believe considering the
US is still pushing for a gulf coalition (WAR!) against i-Ran as well as polically
neutralizing any potential spoiler countries. Also the embassay was built at quite a
significant cost $750 billion.* So, you are right PO, this is bluff by the big puff
Plumpeo.
i-Rack has also being trying to get rid of American military presence even though they
have bought F-16IQs from Washington but the latter is using the same figleaf excuse as in
Syria that they are 'fighting terrorists.'
The USA will never abandon its crown jewel in Iraq, and it would make little practical
difference anyway, as it lies entirely within the American 'Green Zone', and they will surely
not abandon that.
"But the location of the compound is well known in Baghdad anyway, where for several
years it has been marked by large construction cranes and all-night work lights easily
visible from the embattled neighborhoods across the river. It is reasonable to assume that
insurgents will soon sit in the privacy of rooms overlooking the site, and use cell phones or
radios to adjust the rocket and mortar fire of their companions. Meanwhile, however, they
seem to have held off, lobbing most of their ordnance elsewhere into the Green Zone, as if
reluctant to slow the completion of such an enticing target."
The Baghdad Embassy is the USA's most-expensive embassy in the world, and it costs far
more to run it each year than the cost of building it, in excess of a Billion dollars a year.
What America might do, and what Iraq does fear, is send its diplomats home for awhile, and
use it as an excuse to open a military operation in Iraq against what it terms Iran-aligned
militias.
Putin proposed, "exchanging guarantees of non-interference in each other's internal
affairs, including electoral processes, including using information and communication
technologies and high-tech methods."..
####
That is some excellently timed next level trolling from Pootie-McPoot-Face.
Of course the USA will never agree to such a proposal, because (a) it does not regard its
meddling as 'interference' but as the bringing of the gift of freedom, (b) it stands on its
absolute right of judgment as to what is a situation that requires more democracy and what is
not, and (c) it probably knows at some level that Russia did not meddle in the US elections,
and that it would therefore in that case be constraining its own behavior in exchange for
nothing.
But then, when refused – I imagine the US will try to extract something from the
offer, such as "A-HA!! So you ADMIT to meddling in our elections!! – Russia can
obviously claim, "Well, we tried."
The Vatican teaches Warsaw how properly to deal with Belarus
Full in the panting heart of Rome,
Beneath th'apostle's crowning dome,
From pilgrims' lips that kiss the ground,
Breathes in all tongues only one sound:
'God bless our Pope, God bless our Pope,
God bless our Pope, the great, the good.
' Following the visit to the Vatican on Friday, September 25, of Polish President Andrzej
Duda and his wife, the Press Department of the Holy See published a short message. It said
that Pope Francis received Duda, after which the President met Secretary of State Cardinal
Pietro Parolin and Secretary for Relations with States, Archbishop Paul Gallagher. And
further: "Heartfelt discussions took place in the context of the centenary of the birth of
St. John Paul II and the 40th anniversary of the founding of the independent trade union
"Solidarity". Several topics of mutual interest related to the mission of the Church were
discussed, including the issues of strengthening families and raising young people. Finally,
attention was drawn to some international issues such as the current health emergency,
regional situation and security".
What is meant by "regional situation and security" was later deciphered by Duda
himself. Note that these issues were not the subject of his conversation with the pontiff,
they were raised during negotiations with Cardinal Parolin, who is in charge of the practical
leadership of Vatican diplomacy. According to the Polish president, they talked about the
situation in Belarus. "The cardinal asked how we perceive what is happening, I in turn asked
what is the position of the Holy See", said Duda. "In fact, we came to a common opinion that
it is necessary to support all those who want real democracy, who want freedom, who want to
live in an honest state: these people should have our support. But, of course, Belarus must
make its own decision in free and fair elections. Here we have an unambiguous position that
the international community should demand from the Belarusian authorities: that the policy in
Belarus be carried out in such a way as to hold the elections fairly. And the Belarusian
people should be supported in this. The international community should support the Belarusian
people."
At the same time, the President of Poland did not specify such key issues as when to
hold "fair elections" -- now, after the constitutional reform in Belarus or the end of the
next term of office of the recently inaugurated President Alexander Lukashenko. Nor was it
said who Lukashenka is for Warsaw. After all, the international community has an ambiguous
attitude towards it. Thus, for Vilnius, he is "the former president of Belarus, both
politically and legally". Germany and the EU diplomatic department use the formula of
"missing or insufficient democratic legitimacy necessary for his recognition as the
legitimate president" in relation to Lukashenko. With all its usual demagogy, Washington has
discussed the candidacy of the US Ambassador to Belarus Julie Fischer through the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee and is sending her to Minsk, where she will present her
credentials to the President, which means recognition of Lykashenko.
Everything is much more interesting in the case of Warsaw. As the former Polish
diplomat Witold Jurash notes, the Polish Foreign Ministry speaks of the lack of legitimacy of
Lukashenko and the illegality of his government, but, unlike Prime Minister Mateusz
Morawiecki, does not declare that Poland does not recognize Lukashenko as president. "The
prime minister, it seems, in turn, assumes the latter", the expert believes, calling the
difference between the positions of the diplomatic department and the head of government
"principled". As for Duda, on this issue he is closer to the Foreign Ministry and the Vatican
than to the prime minister. It is not yet known what exactly the Secretary of State of the
Holy See replied to the Polish president during the meeting in the Vatican, but his position
can be reconstructed based on indirect data. Recall that on September 16, the cardinal
ordained the new apostolic nuncio in Belarus, Ante Jozic, to the bishopric in Croatia. This
is not an ordinary event, it is obvious that it was important for Parolin to personally meet
with Jozic and explain to him the Vatican's line regarding the republic, the development of
the situation in which the Holy See is closely watching.
A little later, the Nuncio gave a detailed interview to the Croatian Catholic portal
IKA-Zagreb. Answering the question about his mission in Belarus, he highlighted the
following. "First", said Jozic, "one of the main tasks of a nuncio is the appointment of new
bishops: after the retirement of bishops who have reached the age of 75, the nunciature
initiates the procedure for appointing new ones. This is an indication of the head of the
Belarusian Catholics, Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, who has been in Poland since the end
of August and who, by order of the Belarusian authorities, is not allowed back to Minsk. In
January 2021, he will just turn 75 years old, and it seems that the Holy See will not
hesitate in satisfying his resignation petition. Secondly", stressed the nuncio, "the
Catholic Church will not interfere in politics", because if "the Church or its leaders choose
this or that person, then there is a division of believers". This is already a response to
Belarusian Catholics, who are carried away by participation in protests against Lukashenko's
administration, and some of them are even unhappy with the fact that the Vatican refuses to
directly support their political demands. .
The Northern Crusade against Baltic pagans and Slav heretics.
Chaucer's Knight:
Seen the elephant he had: been everywhere, done everything:
A Knight ther was, and that a worthy man,
That fro the tyme that he first bigan
To ryden out, he loved chivalrye,
Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisye.
Ful worthy was he in his lordes werre,
And therto hadde he riden (no man ferre)
As wel in Cristendom as hethenesse,
And ever honoured for his worthinesse.
At Alisaundre he was, whan it was wonne;
Ful ofte tyme he hadde the bord bigonne
Aboven alle notions in Pruce.
In Lettow hadde he reysed and in Ruce,
No Cristen man so ofte of his degree.
In Gernade at the sege eek hadde he be
Of Algezir, and riden in Belmarye.
At Lyeys was he, and at Satalye,
Whan they were wonne; and in the Grete See
At many a noble aryve hadde he be.
At mortal batailles hadde he been fiftene,
And foughten for our feith at Tramissene
In listes thryes, and ay slayn his foo.
This ilke worthy knight had been also
Somtyme with the lord of Palatye,
Ageyn another hethen in Turkye:
And evermore he hadde a sovereyn prys.
And though that he were worthy, he was wys,
And of his port as meke as is a mayde.
He never yet no vileinye ne sayde
In al his lyf, un-to no maner wight.
He was a verray parfit gentil knight.
Where hadn't he been?
Pruce -- Prussia: not German then but pagan Baltic tribes.
Lettow -- Lithuania: Baltic pagan tribe.
Ruce -- Russia; heretical Eastern Orthodox.
The rest of the time he seems to have been kicking Muslim arse around the Mediterranean,
but, clearly, Northern European pagans and Eastern European Orthodox Christians were also
considered fair game.
Worthy of sainthood I would say if not already sainted by the Vatican. My understanding is
that most largest Crusades were directed against the Eastern Orthodox just as they are now
but in a different form. Modern folks do not fully appreciate the persistence of history.
If you are affected by Covid, it is certainly not apparent from the quality and quantity
of your posts!
"... Virtually every aspect of the Syrian opposition was cultivated and marketed by Western government-backed public relations firms, from their political narratives to their branding, from what they said to where they said it. ..."
"Western government-funded intelligence cutouts trained Syrian opposition leaders,
planted stories in media outlets from BBC to Al Jazeera, and ran a cadre of journalists. A
trove of leaked documents exposes the propaganda network."
"Leaked documents show how UK government contractors developed an advanced infrastructure of
propaganda to stimulate support in the West for Syria's political and armed opposition.
Virtually every aspect of the Syrian opposition was cultivated and marketed by Western
government-backed public relations firms, from their political narratives to their branding,
from what they said to where they said it.
The leaked files reveal how Western intelligence cutouts played the media like a fiddle,
carefully crafting English- and Arabic-language media coverage of the war on Syria to churn out
a constant stream of pro-opposition coverage.
US and European contractors trained and advised Syrian opposition leaders at all levels,
from young media activists to the heads of the parallel government-in-exile . These firms also
organized interviews for Syrian opposition leaders on mainstream outlets such as BBC and the
UK's Channel 4.
More than half of the stringers used by Al Jazeera in Syria were trained in a joint US-UK
government program called Basma, which produced hundreds of Syrian opposition media
activists.
Western government PR firms not only influenced the way the media covered Syria, but as the
leaked documents reveal, they produced their own propagandistic pseudo-news for broadcast on
major TV networks in the Middle East, including BBC Arabic, Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and Orient
TV .
These UK-funded firms functioned as full-time PR flacks for the extremist-dominated Syrian
armed opposition. One contractor, called InCoStrat, said it was in constant contact with a
network of more than 1,600 international journalists and "influencers," and used them to push
pro-opposition talking points.
Another Western government contractor, ARK, crafted a strategy to "re-brand" Syria's
Salafi-jihadist armed opposition by "softening its image ." ARK boasted that it provided
opposition propaganda that "aired almost every day on" major Arabic-language TV networks."
"The Western contractor ARK was a central force in launching the White Helmets operation.
The leaked documents show ARK ran the Twitter and Facebook pages of Syria Civil Defense,
known more commonly as the White Helmets.
ARK also facilitated communications between the White Helmets and The Syria
Campaign , a PR firm run out of London and New York that helped popularize the White
Helmets in the United States.
It was apparently "following subsequent discussions with ARK and the teams" that The Syria
Campaign "selected civil defence to front its campaign to keep Syria in the news," the firm
wrote in a report for the UK Foreign Office." thegreyzone
--------------
Using really basic intelligence analytic tools; Occam's Razor, Walks like a duck,
Smileyesque back azimuth's, etc. it has been clear that the UK government has been deeply
involved in sponsoring and influencing the Syrian/ jihadi opposition in that miserable country.
The wide spread British Old Boys network of aspirants to the tradition of imperial manipulation
has been visible just below the surface if you had eyes to look and a brain to think.
A lot of the money for this folly came right out of USAID.
I object to the line in the article that they "played the media like a fiddle" - as it
implies the mainstream media is a victim as opposed to willing accomplice.
The American public very strongly told Obama they didn't want another invasion and war in
the middle east (red lines or not) so rather ineffective propaganda.
Moreover, I suspect that given the US public inattention to overseas events that do not
involve much US blood (in places they can not find on a map). Today's mess would be where
more or less the same if the entire IO had never happened - though maybe with less cynicism
of US/UK gov'ts and media.
OTH, it is curious how well the British Old Boys network (and US) aligns with Israeli
interests (and runs counter to US or British interests). Maybe grayzone will investigate that
(impressive) IO campaign. I think a small country in the middle east played US and UK elites
like a fiddle.
I've only given this article a cursory reading so far and it is clear that the Brits are
going balls to the wall on the PSYOPS/perception management front. This campaign flows
naturally from the strong material support for the Syrian "moderate rebels" provided by the
US, the Brits and probably others for years. We may still be blowing up IS jihadis, but we're
also supporting our own brand of jihadis around Al-Tanf, giving free hand to Erdogan's
jihadis along the Turkish-Syrian border and doing our best to stymie R+6 efforts to crush the
remaining jihadis and unite Syria.
The article focuses on the contractors role in PSYOP. I'm not sure if it mentions the
British government's role in this. The GCHQ's Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group
(JTRIG) probably manages most of those contractors. The British Army also has the 77th
Brigade. This brigade's slogan is: "behavioural change is our unique selling point". Gordon
MacMillan, a reserve officer with the 77th Brigade, is now Twitter's head of editorial
operations for the Middle East.
The 77th was formed in 2015 and subsumed the 15th Psychological Operations Group which was
headed by Steve Tathan, who went on to head the defence division of SCL, the now defunct
parent of Cambridge Analytica. I'm sure the 77th is capable of managing some of those
contractors, as well. I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few of contractors were also
reservists in the 77th.
I bet we're not letting the Brits have all the fun. The CIA Special Activities Center
(formerly SAD) includes the Political Action Group for PSYOP, economic warfare and
cyberwarfare. That dovetails nicely with what CENTCOM is doing in Syria. I knew some of those
guys a while back. I remember scaring them with some of my own anarchist hacker rantings when
I was penetrating those hackers.
Our Army has fours PSYOP groups brigade-sized), two active and 2 reserve. I would think
they have advanced their methodology since I took the course at Bragg. For a few years, they
were called military information support operations (MISO) groups rather than PSYOP groups.
They have since reverted to their PSYOP name although their activities are referred to as
MISO. I don't know what the difference is.
There is no such small country as you describe in the Near East.
There is an self-disciplined proxy force masquerading as a state which is mostly funded by
the United States to further the religious policies of the WASP Culture Continent.
It is no accident that in this context, the names of US and UK occur often in the same
sentences; one declared a crusade to wrestle control of Plastine from Muslims, and the otber
one carried out that crusade and escalated it.
That is also the reason that US cannot end the war over Palestine or leave Islamdom
(Oil, Geostrategic considerations, arms sales, Realpolitik are just pseudo-rationications
to obscure the real war.)
"WASP Culture" is into golfing, not crusading. Erik Prince and the religious
fundamentalists, maybe, but they don't drive US policy.
Russia and/or Chinese dominion over Eurasia cannot be permitted. Their means to achieve
that would be less ethical, not that the US or UK have been prince among men and salts of the
earth, as noted in the article.
The US has tried in vain to win over hearts and minds. It has been a mostly noble effort
to bring countries like Iraq and Afghanistan into the 21st century, but it was always more of
a losing game. The problem lies too much in Islam and tribal rivalries.
Truth be told: political operatives own and run our MSM. This is why the press is called
the 'Fourth Estate'.
They are more correctly described as a Fifth Column , one far more open and sworn to
destroy our country and its foundational citizens – and taxpayers – as any that
ever operated during World War II. You would think this would be of vital interest to people
who loudly declare themselves to be "Nazi-punchers", but who time and again show themselves to
be merely low-level street terrorists informed and inspired by Mao's Red Guard and the
irredeemable thugs of the African National Congress.
One wonders what's preventing them from
mimicking the Red Terror waged by the leftists of Spain, when the battle for "freedom" involved
the disinterment of the graves of Catholic clergy to better pose the corpses in blasphemous
positions. Imagine how depraved those Mostly Peaceful protesters had to have been for even a
leftist-supporting site such as Wikipedia to baldly state
The violence consisted of the killing of tens of thousands of people (including 6,832
Roman Catholic priests, the vast majority in the summer of 1936 in the wake of the military
coup), attacks on the Spanish nobility, industrialists, and conservative politicians, as well
as the desecration and burning of monasteries and churches.
Directly in the crosshairs this time are small and medium-sized owner-operated businesses
– the true backbone of American freedom and prosperity – who have largely been
sacrificed in exchange for the knock-kneed offerings of Danegeld from our giant conglomerates,
all of whom have prospered immensely from the suffering and privation brought on by the
Democratic lockdown of society – and the total shutdown of our economy.
Think! – have you read a single article charting how the government war on small
business directly enriched Amazon.com and
world's richest autocrat, Jeff Bezos? . who then funnels his windfall into a newspaper that
blatantly pimps for the Democratic Party, which translates into a vast payday for the DNC, not
least from its newly-approved partnership with the shadowy and many-tentacled Soros-surrogate
group, BLM?
The result is what you'd expect when a fringe group operates with the full cooperation and
partnership of major industry and both political parties (don't confuse Trump with a
standard-issue Republican, please – he may have terrible flaws, but that isn't one of
them) – 10% of the population holding the other 90% in a chokehold with only one set of
rules: no arrest and prosecution for Bolshevik violence and terror ..but the zero-tolerance
heavy hand of corrupt Leviathan coming down hard against any and all citizens who fight back
or, eventually – inevitably – who even struggle against their restraints.
Short of the sudden arrival of celestial horsemen to punish the guilty and reward the
set-upon, it has become clear that the only answer is the one that the Powers That Be claim to
be dead set against: racial separatism. (Particularly when we consider that all that will be
necessary to turn America into Hell on earth will be the adoption of Ibram Kendi's First Law,
sometimes known as equality of outcome :
To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the
U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is
evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals.
Could any "amendment" be more terrifyingly totalitarian than this?)
White and black separation would, instead, accomplish two goals, both more important than
Kendi's quick fix: we would learn soon enough about actual equality of outcomes (which
is why no Communist, black or white, wants anything to do with the creation of one more failed
basket-case black state), and much more importantly, white families can sleep secure in their
beds at night, without worrying about Apache raids at midnight, egged on and recorded for
"posterity" by that Fourth Estate/Fifth Column referred to up top. Because the fact of the
matter is that, even should some combination of government and law-enforcement halt the burning
and looting of America – as things stand now, none of the worst malefactors will ever see
the inside of a prison cell .which means any ceasefire will only be temporary, to be violently
ripped asunder the moment they sense white Americans have at last lowered their guard once
more. And living in perpetual paranoid readiness for violent uprisings and mindless destruction
is no way to live at all.
Trump has it half right, a border wall is the answer: only it needs to run
lengthwise , between the Southern and Northern borders. If we don't use the next four
years to plan out such a separation, fretting over our children's children will be a fruitless
exercise – those who aren't murdered will be captured and 'go native' .and in case you
haven't looked at a globe lately, there's no place left to run.
As a recovering journalist, I can point out that even on a rinkydink rag in a small city,
where I got fired for being a real journalist back in the early '70's; he who owns the
presses and distribution networks calls the tune. It's a matter of working-class (no matter
how middle-class your income or social-status) versus the ownership class. The latter wins
every time.
When the "Fox News Sunday" host takes the stage on Tuesday to moderate the first
presidential debate of 2020, he will for 90 minutes be the most important person in the
world.
His questions, his demeanor, his raised eyebrow will signal to millions of voters how they
are to assess the two candidates -- President Donald John Trump and former Vice President
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.
If his questions are piercing for both, if his skepticism is applied equally to both the
Republican and Democrat, then all is well in this corner of the world of journalism. But if
instead Wallace accuses Trump and coddles Biden, we will have one more instance of media bias,
which has become so rampant that President Trump had to christen it with a pet name -- Fake
News.
Every day, the supposedly professional press corps cozies up to Biden with softball
questions ("Why aren't you more angry at President Trump?" has to be my favorite!) while
accusing Trump of being a mass murderer, a racist and a Putin puppet. So conservatives are
entirely justified in having low expectations for the debate and for Wallace, who has
exhibited symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome more than once.
Wallace can ask anything he wants of Trump. I am confident the president will acquit himself
admirably, but the litmus test for Wallace playing fair in the debate will be whether or not he
asks any hard-hitting questions of Biden -- especially about the new Senate
report on the corrupt activities of his son Hunter in Ukraine and elsewhere.
If you have heard anything about the Biden report on CNN and MSNBC, or read about it in your
newspapers, chances are you came away thinking that Republicans had made up a series of fake
charges against the Bidens. "Nothing to see here. Move along."
The
Washington Post , as usual, was at the front of the pack for Fake News coverage. The Post
used its headline to focus entirely on Hunter's position on the board of the corrupt Ukrainian
energy company Burisma, and claimed that the report doesn't show that the cozy arrangement
"changed U.S. policy" -- as if that were the only reason you would not want a vice president's
son enriching himself at the trough of foreign oligarchs.
The story then spent most of its 35 paragraphs excusing Hunter's behavior either directly or
through surrogates such as Democrat senators, and most nauseatingly by quoting Hunter Biden's
daughter, Naomi, who "offered a personal tribute to her father" in the form of a series of
tweets, including the following:
"Though the whole world knows his name, no one knows who he is. Here's a thread on my dad,
Hunter Biden -- free of charge to the taxpayers and free of the corrosive influence of
power-at-all-costs politics. The truth of a man filled with love, integrity, and human
struggles." Oh my, that's convincing evidence of innocence of wrongdoing. I imagine she also
endorses her grandfather for president, for what it's worth.
The three reporters who wrote the Post piece also spin the facts like whirling dervishes.
They say that the report by Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley "rehashes" known details of
the matter. They quote Democrats to say without evidence that the report's key findings are
"rooted in a known Russian disinformation effort."
The following passage in particular shows how one-sided the story is:
"Democrats argue that Johnson has 'repeatedly impugned' Biden, and they pointed to his
recent comments hinting that the report would shed light on Biden's 'unfitness for office,'
as reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, to argue that the entire investigation was
orchestrated as a smear campaign to benefit Trump."
Using the "shoe on the other foot" test, can you ever imagine a similar statement being made
in the Washington Post about the Trump impeachment investigation? Let's see. How would that
go?
"Republicans argue that Rep. Adam Schiff has 'repeatedly impugned' Trump, and they pointed
to his recent comments hinting that the report would shed light on Trump's 'unfitness for
office' to argue that the entire investigation was orchestrated as a smear campaign to
benefit Biden."
Oh yeah, sure! The chance of reading that paragraph in the Washington Post news pages would
have been absolutely zero.
Perhaps even more insidious was the decision by the editors to push the most significant
news in the report to the bottom of the Post's story. That is the lucrative relationship that
Hunter Biden established in 2017 with a Chinese oil tycoon named Ye Jianming. Biden was
apparently paid $1 million to represent Ye's assistant while he was facing bribery charges in
the United States.
Even more disturbing, "In August 2017, a subsidiary of Ye's company wired $5 million into
the bank account of a U.S. company called Hudson West III, which over the next 13 months sent
$4.79 million marked as consulting fees to Hunter Biden's firm, the report said. Over the same
period, Hunter Biden's firm wired some $1.4 million to a firm associated with his uncle and
aunt, James and Sara Biden, according to the report."
Then, in late 2017, "Hunter Biden and a financier associated with Ye also opened a line of
credit for Hudson West III that authorized credit cards for Hunter Biden, James Biden and Sara
Biden, according to the report, which says the Bidens used the credit cards to purchase more
than $100,000 worth of items, including airline tickets and purchases at hotels and
restaurants."
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The Post also glossed over payments received by Hunter Biden from Yelena Baturina, who the
story acknowledges "is the widow of former Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov and is a member of
Kazakhstan's political elite." What the story doesn't say is that the payments received by
Hunter Biden's companies while Joe Biden was vice president totaled close to $4 million. Does
anyone have even the slightest curiosity why Hunter's companies received these payments from a
Russian oligarch? As Donald Trump Jr. noted, if he had the same record of taking money from
foreign nationals, he "would be in jail right now."
In other words, the headline and the lede of the Washington Post story were entirely
misleading. What readers should have been told is that there is a pattern of corruption and
inexplicable enrichment in the Biden family that has continued for years and that Joe Biden has
turned his back on it.
Seems worthy of the attention of the voters who will determine the nation's leadership for
the next four years. So the most important question at the debate Tuesday night is the
following: Will Chris Wallace take the same cowardly path as the Washington Post, or will he
demand an answer from candidate Biden as to why influence peddling, conflicts of interest and
virtual money laundering are acceptable?
Based on Wallace's track record, I'm not holding my breath that we will get either the
question or the answer, but if we do, I will happily applaud him as the tough-as-nails
journalist he is supposed to be.
play_arrow chubbar , 1 hour ago
Wallace is co-opted, he's a plant. NO way does he ask about corruption or go after
Joe.
CosmoJoe , 1 hour ago
All Trump needs to do is jab Biden every time his brain locks up; toss in phrases like
"Its OK Joe, take your time". Keep doing that until Biden gets angry and its all over. (Well,
its over anyhow, but....)
Karl Malden's Nose , 1 hour ago
He knew how to push Hillary's buttons and even though she's a spaz she's lightyears
smarter than Joe. Biden is going to fume and crap his depends because Trump is about to knock
him flat on his ***. He'll be stammering to answer while Trump has already moved on to the
next gut punch. There's no gotcha's on Trump, only Biden. Trump is plugged in to everything
and sharp as a knife. Biden will be struggling to remember his instructions and I'm sure
they'll have an ear piece on him he won't hear too clearly.
Hoax Fatigue , 25 minutes ago
Nobody is expecting (((Wallace))) to be fair.
High Vigilante , 1 hour ago
Trump should bring it up, as soon as possible.
There is no guarantee Biden won't skip other debates.
Plus it would make Biden angry and negate the effect of drugs he will be loaded with.
True Historian , 1 hour ago
I have watched Wallace and he is a pretentious pile of excrement. FOX with its "Fair and
Balanced" left the station when they were bought out by Disney.
Wallace sample questions:
Trump : When did you stop being a corrupt NAZI/Russian bitch?
Biden : Are you feeling OK today? If not, how can I make you more comfortable.
CosmoJoe , 1 hour ago
Trump had some fairly hostile moderators in the 2016 debates and he held his own. He has
to be just as merciless with Biden as he was with Hillary. The news doesn't want to talk
about Hunter and his wire transfers from Russia. This is Trump's chance to throw that crap
right into the spotlight.
alexcojones , 1 hour ago
Quote : "Every day, the supposedly professional press corps cozies up to Biden with
softball questions... while accusing Trump of being a mass murderer, a racist and a Putin
puppet."
Why? That's because the so-called "Legacy" media is now the Enemy of The American
People.
Soloamber , 1 hour ago
The question is how long can Wallace hide his anti-Trimp bias ?
Mr. Biden ...what is your favorite color ?
President Trump why do you pay no tax ?
Mr. Biden Isn't China our greatest ally ?
President Trump have you heard from Stormy lately ?
Mr . Biden Please provide your wife's first name .
President Trump.... You appear over weight have you had your blood pressure checked ?
Would you agree to do it now ?
Mr . Biden what are some of your greats political achievements in your distinguished
political legacy ?
President Trump why have you caused global warming ?
DeplorableGlobalConflictWatch , 1 hour ago
Chris Wallace is a joke. Make sure he's sick and replaced by Tucker Carlson.
RealEstateArbitrage , 1 hour ago
Wally is a plant by the deep state. He is a liar and a fool.
Migao , 1 hour ago
Wallace, like his dad, pretentious snob. Yeah, Trump's a jerk, but he's a lovable jerk.
Wallace is a pretentious snob.
JUICE E SMALL IT EMPIRE , 2 hours ago
No, Ukraine and China should be front and center. It is an election year. And the Dems
have screwed us royally.
Recruiting for military is much easier if there is no jobs.
Notable quotes:
"... They want to eliminate the EPA, vacate the State Dept and many other Depts, except for a few high-placed cronies, wipe all financial, labour, consumer and environmental regulations off the books; eliminate or reduce to a bare minimum federal health insurance, medicaid, medicare and Social Security, crush public education, privatize everything they can sell, and so on. They are not in power to "govern" but to destroy government. This is all being done with a fairly unified agenda: to free "the market" from any restrictions whatsoever, so that they -- global elites -- can make as much money as possible. It's a cabal of global corporations, militarists, Christian sovereign white supremacists, fossil fuel giants and bankers ..."
I wonder if any of the commentators here have considered that the [neoliberal] cabal now
in power in the US (not elsewhere) are not in power to "take power" except for a temporary
period. They don't want to run the federal government, they want to destroy it, except for
the police state and the military.
They want to eliminate the EPA, vacate the State Dept and many other Depts, except for
a few high-placed cronies, wipe all financial, labour, consumer and environmental regulations
off the books; eliminate or reduce to a bare minimum federal health insurance, medicaid,
medicare and Social Security, crush public education, privatize everything they can sell, and
so on. They are not in power to "govern" but to destroy government. This is all being done
with a fairly unified agenda: to free "the market" from any restrictions whatsoever, so that
they -- global elites -- can make as much money as possible. It's a cabal of global
corporations, militarists, Christian sovereign white supremacists, fossil fuel giants and
bankers , and I think there's a high degree of cooperation for the agenda. The
revolution is the cabal run by Trump/Bannon who are more extreme and ideological than any
previous faction, who have no tolerance for compromise. They have an apocalyptic vision of
grinding it all down to a bare minimum police state.
Ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections, foreign states will continue to use covert and overt
influence measures in their attempts to sway U.S. voters' preferences and perspectives, shift
U.S. policies, increase discord in the United States, and undermine the American people's
confidence in our democratic process."
What America is yet again conniving to do is to discredit any domestic political dissent
against the fraud of "American Democracy" by connecting this dissent to those nations that
are the latest targets of America's Two Minutes of Hate campaign.
This is a standard American tactic that the USA always resorts to when it fears its own
citizens are starting to question the fairy tale of American "Democracy and Freedom." Thus,
during the Cold War, the USA even to discredit some elements of the Civil Rights movement as
being assets of the Soviet Union.
The great Orwellian hypocrisy of America's pants-wetting complaints that other countries
are meddling in America's (fake) democracy is that the United States itself is guilty of
regime changing, balkanizing, and colonizing scores of foreign nations dating back over a
century to the USA's regime change and eventual colonization of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
Bottom Line: America needs to drink a big up of Shut the F*ck Up with its pathetic Pity
Party whining about foreigners trying to influence its bogus democracy.
In the United States, a great deal of study and energy goes into promoting respect for
democracy, not just to keep it alive here but also to spread it around the world. It embraces
the will of the majority, whether or not its main beneficiaries have more resources than other
citizens do, as shown by the election of President Obama, who promised hope and change for the
suffering majority, but did not sit long in office before being subjected to an economic vote
of no-confidence.
Those who claim we run a plutocracy (government for the rich by the rich) -- or that we're
victims of a conspiracy contrived by a shadow government -- are right while being wrong.
Our government is beyond the reach of ordinary American citizens in terms of economic power.
However, the creation of a system to keep the majority of the populace at the losing end of a
structure which neither promised nor delivered a state of financial equality was a predictable
extension of the economic system the U.S. government was formed to protect.
... .... ...
Forty years of Cold War and the ultimate realization that abuse of the communist system and
a hierarchy of privilege proved that system to be vulnerable to selfishness -- in common with
the triumphant capitalist countries.
Because any desired outcome can be written into an equation to exclude unwanted facts or
inputs by holding some things constant while applying chosen variables that may not hold true
under every historical circumstance, it's considered "falsifiable" and therefore "scientific."
But only if it appeals to the right people and justifies a given political need will it become
sacrosanct (until the next round of "progress").
.... .... ...
Abusive Self- Interest
In 1764, twenty- five years before the embrace of Madame Guillotine (when heads rolled
literally to put the fear of the mob into politics), contempt for the filth and poverty in
which the French commoners lived while the nobility gorged on luxury goods showed how arrogant
they were, not just in confidence that their offices of entitlement were beyond reproach and
unassailable, but that mockery and insult in the face of deliberate deprivation would be borne
with obedience and humility.
It certainly affected Smith's outlook, since he wrote The Wealth of Nations with a
focus on self- interest rather than moral sentiments. And while this may be purely pragmatic,
based on what
he witnessed, he also wrote about the potential for self- interest to become abusive, both
in collusion with individuals and when combined with the power of government. Business
interests could form cabals (groups of conspirators, plotting public harm) or monopolies
(organizations with exclusive market control) to fix prices at their highest levels. A true
laissez- faire economy would provide every incentive to conspire against consumers and attempt
to influence budgets and legislation.
Smith's assertion that self- interest leads producers to favor domestic industry must also
be understood in the context of the period. While it's true that the Enlightenment was a
movement of rational philosophy radically opposed to secrecy, it's important to understand that
this had to be done respectfully , insofar as all arguments were intended to impress the
monarchy under circumstances where the king believed himself God- appointed and infallible, no
matter his past or present policies, and matters were handled with delicacy. Yet, Smith's
arguments are clear enough (and certainly courageous enough) to be understood in laymen's
terms.
In an era when the very industry he's observing has been fostered by tariffs, monopolies,
labor controls, and materials extracted from colonies, he did his best to balance observation
with what he thought was best for society. It's not his fault we pick and choose our recipes
for what we do and don't believe or where we think Smith might have gone had he been alive
today.
The New Double Standard
The only practical way to resolve the contradiction between the existing beneficiaries of
state favoritism in this period and Smith's aversion to it is to observe that the means to
prevent competition and interference with the transition from one mode of commerce to another
that enhances the strength of the favored or provides a new means to grow their wealth is to
close the door of government intervention behind them and burn any bridges to it.
In psychological terms, the practice of "negative attribution" is to assume that identical
behavior is justifiable for oneself but not another. It may not be inconsistent with a system
of economics founded on self- interest, but it naturally begs a justification as to why it
rules out everyone else's self- interest. The beauty of this system is that it will
always have the same answer.
You may have guessed it.
Progress.
Reallocation of Assets
It was always understood that capitalism produces winners and losers. The art of economizing
is to gain maximum benefit for minimum expenditure, which generally translates to asset
consolidation and does not necessarily mean there is minimum sacrifice. There's an opportunity
cost for everything, whether it's human, financial, environmental, or material. But the most
important tenet of free market capitalism is that asset redistribution requires the U. S.
government to go to DEFCON 1, unless assets are being reallocated for "higher productivity," in
which case the entire universe is saved from the indefensible sin of lost opportunity.
Private property is sacred -- up until an individual decides he can make more productive use
of it and appeals to the courts for seizure under eminent domain or until the government
decides it will increase national growth if owned by some other person or entity. In like
manner, corporations can suffer hostile takeovers, just as deregulation facilitates predatory
market behavior and cutthroat competition promotes an efficiency orientation that means fewer
jobs and lower incomes, which result in private losses.
In the varying range of causes underlying the loss of assets, the common threat is progress
-- the "civilized" justification for depriving some other person or entity of their right to
own property, presumably earned by the sweat of their brow, except their sweat doesn't have the
same champion as someone who can wring more profit from it. The official explanation is that
the government manages the "scarcity" of resources to benefit the world. This is also how we
justify war, aggression, and genocide, though we don't always admit to that unless we mean to
avoid it.
Perfectly Rational Genocide
History cooperates with the definition of Enlightenment if we imagine that thoughtfulness
has something to do with genocide. In the context of American heritage, it has meant that when
someone stands in the way of progress, his or her resources are "reallocated" to serve the
pursuit of maximum profit, with or without consent. The war against Native Americans was one in
which Americans either sought and participated in annihilation efforts or believed this end was
inevitable. In the age of rational thought, meditation on the issue could lead from gratitude
for the help early settlers received from Native Americans to the observation they didn't
enclose their land and had no concept of private property,
to the conviction they were unmotivated by profit and therefore irreconcilable savages. But
it takes more than rational thought to mobilize one society to exterminate another.
The belief in manifest destiny -- that God put the settlers in America for preordained and
glorious purposes which gave them a right to everything -- turned out to be just the ticket for
a free people opposed to persecution and the tyranny of church and state.
Lest the irony elude you, economic freedom requires divorcing the state from religion, but
God can be used to whip up the masses, distribute "It's Them or Us" cards, and send people out
to die on behalf of intellectuals and investors who've rationalized their
chosenness.
CHAPTER TWO: INSTILLING THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE
Selfishness may be exalted as the root and branch of capitalism, but it doesn't make you
look good to the party on the receiving end or those whose sympathy he earns. For that, you
need a government prepared to do four things, which each have separate dictums based on study,
theorization, and experience.
Coercion:
Force is illegitimate only if you can't sell it.
Persuasion:
How do I market thee? Let me count the ways.
Bargaining:
If you won't scratch my back, then how about a piece of the pie?
Indoctrination:
Because I said so. (And paid for the semantics.)
Predatory capitalism is the control and expropriation of land, labor, and natural resources
by a foreign government via coercion, persuasion, bargaining, and indoctrination.
At the coercive stage, we can expect military and/ or police intervention to repress the
subject populace. The persuasive stage will be marked by clientelism, in which a small
percentage of the populace will be rewarded for loyalty, often serving as the capitalists'
administrators, tax collectors, and enforcers. At the bargaining stage, efforts will be made to
include the populace, or a certain percentage of it, in the country's ruling system, and this
is usually marked by steps toward democratic (or, more often, autocratic) governance.
At the fourth stage, the populace is educated by capitalists, such that they continue to
maintain a relationship of dependency.
The Predatory Debt Link
In many cases, post- colonial states were forced to assume the debts of their colonizers.
And where they did not, they were encouraged to become in debt to the West via loans that were
issued through international institutions to ensure they did not fall prey to communism or
pursue other economic policies that were inimical to the West. Debt is the tie that binds
nation states to the geostrategic and economic interests of the West.
As such, the Cold War era was a time of easy credit, luring postcolonial states to undertake
the construction of useless monoliths and monuments, and to even expropriate such loans through
corruption and despotism, thereby making these independent rulers as predatory as colonizers.
While some countries were wiser than others and did use the funds for infrastructural
improvements, these were also things that benefited the West and particularly Western
contractors. In his controversial work Confessions of an Economic Hit Man , John Perkins
reveals that he was a consultant for an American firm (MAIN), whose job was to ensure that
states became indebted beyond their means so they would remain loyal to their creditors, buying
them votes within United Nations organizations, among other things.
Predatory capitalists demand export- orientations as the means to generate foreign currency
with which to pay back debt. In the process, the state must privatize and drastically slash or
eliminate any domestic subsidies which are aimed at helping native industry compete in the
marketplace. Domestic consumption and imports must be radically contained, as shown by the
exchange rate policies recommended by the IMF. The costs of obtaining domestic capital will be
pushed beyond the reach of most native producers, while wages must be depressed to an absolute
bare minimum. In short, the country's land, labor, and natural resources must be sold at
bargain basement prices in order to make these goods competitive, in what one author has called
"a spiraling race to the bottom," as countries producing predominantly the same goods engage in
cutthroat competition whose benefactor is the West.
Under these circumstances, foreign investment is encouraged, but this, too, represents a
loaded situation for countries that open their markets to financial liberalization. Since, in
most cases, the
IMF does not allow restrictions on the conditions of capital inflows, it means that
financial investors can literally dictate their terms. And since no country is invulnerable to
attacks on its currency, which governments must try to keep at a favorable exchange rate, it
means financial marauders can force any country to try to prop up its currency using vital
reserves of foreign exchange which might have been used to pay their debt.
When such is the case, the IMF comes to the rescue with a socalled "bailout fund," that
allows foreign investors to withdraw their funds intact, while the government reels from the
effects of an IMF- imposed austerity plan, often resulting in severe recession the offshoot of
which is bankruptcies by the thousands and plummeting employment.
In countries that experienced IMF bailouts due to attacks on their currencies, the effect
was to reset the market so the only economic survivors were those who remained export- oriented
and were strong enough to withstand the upheaval. This means they remained internationally
competitive, which translates to low earnings of foreign exchange. At the same time that the
country is being bled from the bottom up through mass unemployment, extremely low wages, and
the "spiraling race to the bottom," it is in an even more unfavorable position concerning the
payment of debt. The position is that debt slavery ensues, as much an engine of extraction as
any colonial regime ever managed.
The Role of Indoctrination
The fact that it is sovereign governments overseeing the work of debt repression has much to
do with education, which is the final phase of predatory capitalism, concluding in
indoctrination. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the lesson to the world was that
socialism can't work, nor were there any remaining options for countries that pursued "the
third way" other than capitalism. This produced a virulent strain of neoliberalism in which
most people were, and are, being educated. The most high- ranking of civil servants have either
been educated in the West or directly influenced by its thinking. And this status of acceptance
and adherence finally constitutes indoctrination. The system is now self- sustaining, upheld by
domestic agents.
While predatory capitalism can proceed along a smooth continuum from coercion to persuasion
to bargaining to formal indoctrination, the West can regress to any of these steps at any point
in
time, given the perceived need to interfere with varying degrees of force in order to
protect its interests.
Trojan Politics
Democracy is about having the power and flexibility to graft our system of government and
predatory capitalism onto any target country, regardless of relative strength or conflicting
ideologies. An entire productive industry has grown up using the tools of coercion, persuasion,
bargaining, and formal indoctrination to maximize their impact in the arena of U. S. politics.
Its actors know how to jerk the right strings, push the right buttons, and veer from a soft
sell to a hard sell when resistance dictates war, whether it's with planes overhead and tanks
on the ground or with massive capital flight that panics the whole world.
When the U. S. political economy goes into warp overdrive, its job proves far more valuable
than anything ever made in the strict material sense because there's never been more at stake
in terms of what it's trying to gain. It's the American idea machine made up of corporations,
lobbyists, think tanks, foundations, universities, and consultants in every known discipline
devoted to mass consumerism, and what they sell is illusory opportunity dressed in American
principles. They embrace political candidates who'll play by elitist rules to preserve the
fiction of choice, and, in this way, they maintain legitimacy, no matter what kind of
"reallocation" is on the economic agenda.
The issue is not whether we'll question it, but who we'll applaud for administering it.
In the Information Age, perception management is king.
We can both be right. Russia cockblocking Israel's ability to just roll over Assad's
Syria, their relationship with Iran, etc. are big factors. It's been pretty funny to watch
American Progressives rant and rave about Russia like warmonger rednecks in the 80's who just
watched Rocky IV.
NATO seems to be trying to frighten Russia with maneuvers in Poland and B-52 flights over
the Ukraine and the Black Sea ( see here for a full analysis). As for the
Poles and Ukronazis, they apparently believe that the Russian bear covered himself in poop and
ran away at full speed.
What I am going to say next is not a secret, every military person who looked into this
issue knows and understands this: NATO, and I mean the combined power of all NATO member
states, simply does not have the hardware needed to wage a war against Russia in Europe. What
NATO does have is only sufficient to trigger a serious incident which might result in a
shooting war. But once this war starts, the chances of victory for NATO are exactly zero.
Why?
Well, for one thing, while coalitions of countries might give a thin veneer of political
legitimacy to a military action (in reality, only a UNSC resolution would), in purely military
terms you are much better off having a single national military. Not only that, but coalitions
are nothing but the expression of an often held delusion: the delusion that the little guy can
hide behind the back of the big guy. Poland's entire history can be summarized in this simple
principle: strike the weak and bootlick (or
even worse !) the powerful. In contrast, real military powers don't count on some other guy
doing the heavy lifting for them. They simply fight until they win.
Yes, the Europeans, being the cowards that they are, do believe that there is safety in
numbers. But each time these midgets gang up on Russia and start barking (or, to use Putin's
expression, start oinking ) all together, the Russians clearly
see that the Europeans are afraid. Otherwise, they would not constantly seek somebody to
protect them (even against a non-existing threat).
As a direct result of this delusion, NATO simply does not have the equivalent of the
First
Guard Tank Army in spite of the fact that NATO has a bigger population and much bigger
budgets than Russia. Such a tank Army is what it would take to fight a real war in Europe,
Russia has such an Army. NATO does not.
The other thing NATO does not have is a real integrated multi-layered air defense system.
Russia does.
Lastly, NATO has no hypersonic weapons. Russia does.
(According to President Trump, the US does have super-dooper " hydrosonic " weapons, but nobody really knows what that is
supposed to mean).
I would even argue that the comparatively smaller Belarusian military could make hamburger
meat of the roughly three times larger Polish armed forces in a very short time (unlike the
Poles, the Belarusian are excellent soldiers and they know that they are surrounded by hostile
countries on three sides).
As for the "armed forces" of the Baltic statelets, they are just a sad joke.
One more example: the Empire is now sending ships into the Black Sea as some kind of "show
of force". Yet, every military analyst out there knows that the Black Sea is a "Russian lake"
and that no matter how many ships the US or NATO sends into the Black Sea, their life
expectancy in case of a conflict would be measured in minutes.
There is a popular expression in Russia which, I submit, beautifully sums up the current
US/NATO doctrine: пугать ежа
голой
задницей , which can be translated as "
trying to scare a hedgehog with your naked bottom ".
The truth is that NATO military forces currently are all in very bad shape – all of
them, including the US – and that their only advantage over Russia is in numbers. But as
soon as you factor in training, command and control, the ability to operate with severely
degraded C3I capabilities, the average age of military hardware or morale – the Russian
armed forces are far ahead of the West.
Does anybody sincerely believe that a few B-52s and a few thousand soldiers from different
countries playing war in Poland will really scare the Russian generals?
But if not – why the threats?
My explanation is simple: the rulers of the Empire simply hope that the people in the West
will never find out how bad their current military posture really is, and they also know that
Russia will never attack first – so they simply pretend like they are still big, mighty
and relevant. This is made even easier by the fact that the Russians always downplay their real
capabilities (in sharp contrast to the West which always brags about "the best XYZ in the
world"). That, and the fact that nobody in the Western ruling classes wants to admit that the
game is over and that the Empire has collapsed.
... the Empire still refuses to deal with Russia in any other way except insults, bullying,
threats, accusations, sanctions, and constant sabre-rattling. This has never, and I mean never,
worked in the past, and it won't work in the future. But, apparently, NATO generals simply
cannot comprehend that insanity can be defined as " doing the same thing over and over
again, while hoping to achieve different results ".
Finally, I will conclude with a short mention of US politicians.
First, Trump. He now declares that the Russians stole the secret of hypersonic weapons from
Obama. This reminds me of how the Brits declared that Russia stole their vaccine against the
sars-cov-2 virus. But, if the Russians stole all that, why is it that ONLY Russia has deployed
hypersonic weapons (not the US) and ONLY Russia has both two vaccines and 2 actual treatments
(and not the UK)? For a good laugh, check out Andrei Martyanov's great column " Russia
Steal Everything ".
And then there is Nancy Pelosi who, apparently, is considering, yes, you guessed it –
yet another impeachment attempt against Trump? The charge this time? Exercising this
Presidential prerogative to nominate a successor to Ruth Ginsburg. Okay, Pelosi might be
senile, but she also is in deep denial if she thinks impeaching Trump is still a viable
project. Frankly? I think that she lost it.
In fact, I think that all the Dems have gone absolutely insane: they are now considering
packing both the Supreme Court and the Senate. The fact that doing so will destroy the US
political system does not seem to bother them in the least.
Conclusion: quos Deus vult perdere prius dementat !
We live in a world where facts or logic have simply become irrelevant and nobody cares about
such clearly outdated categories. We have elevated " doubleplusgoodthinking " into an art form. We
have also done away with the concepts of "proof" or "evidence" which we have replaced with
variations on the "highly likely" theme. We have also, for all practical purpose, jettisoned
the entire corpus of international law and replaced it with " rules-based
international order ". In fact, I can only agree with Chris Hedges who, in his superb book
the " Empire of
illusions " and of the "triumph of spectacle". He is absolutely correct: not only is this a
triumph of appearance over substance, and of ideology over reality, it is even the triumph of
self-destruction over self-preservation.
There is not big "master plan", no complex international conspiracy, no 5D chess. All we
have is yet another empire committing suicide and, like so many before this one, this suicide
is executed by this empire's ruling classes.
According to the updated Russian military doctrine, any missile fired at Russia would be
considered tipped with Nuclear war head. If so, with available Hypersonic weapons, a
significant portions of the Empire, including EU would be potentially turned to Radioactive
ash within 20 minutes. Does this register at the highest levels of the Empire? I surely
hope so.
In the United States, a great deal of study and energy goes into promoting respect for
democracy, not just to keep it alive here but also to spread it around the world. It embraces
the will of the majority, whether or not its main beneficiaries have more resources than other
citizens do, as shown by the election of President Obama, who promised hope and change for the
suffering majority, but did not sit long in office before being subjected to an economic vote
of no-confidence.
Those who claim we run a plutocracy (government for the rich by the rich) -- or that we're
victims of a conspiracy contrived by a shadow government -- are right while being wrong.
Our government is beyond the reach of ordinary American citizens in terms of economic power.
However, the creation of a system to keep the majority of the populace at the losing end of a
structure which neither promised nor delivered a state of financial equality was a predictable
extension of the economic system the U.S. government was formed to protect.
... .... ...
Forty years of Cold War and the ultimate realization that abuse of the communist system and
a hierarchy of privilege proved that system to be vulnerable to selfishness -- in common with
the triumphant capitalist countries.
Because any desired outcome can be written into an equation to exclude unwanted facts or
inputs by holding some things constant while applying chosen variables that may not hold true
under every historical circumstance, it's considered "falsifiable" and therefore "scientific."
But only if it appeals to the right people and justifies a given political need will it become
sacrosanct (until the next round of "progress").
.... .... ...
Abusive Self- Interest
In 1764, twenty- five years before the embrace of Madame Guillotine (when heads rolled
literally to put the fear of the mob into politics), contempt for the filth and poverty in
which the French commoners lived while the nobility gorged on luxury goods showed how arrogant
they were, not just in confidence that their offices of entitlement were beyond reproach and
unassailable, but that mockery and insult in the face of deliberate deprivation would be borne
with obedience and humility.
It certainly affected Smith's outlook, since he wrote The Wealth of Nations with a
focus on self- interest rather than moral sentiments. And while this may be purely pragmatic,
based on what
he witnessed, he also wrote about the potential for self- interest to become abusive, both
in collusion with individuals and when combined with the power of government. Business
interests could form cabals (groups of conspirators, plotting public harm) or monopolies
(organizations with exclusive market control) to fix prices at their highest levels. A true
laissez- faire economy would provide every incentive to conspire against consumers and attempt
to influence budgets and legislation.
Smith's assertion that self- interest leads producers to favor domestic industry must also
be understood in the context of the period. While it's true that the Enlightenment was a
movement of rational philosophy radically opposed to secrecy, it's important to understand that
this had to be done respectfully , insofar as all arguments were intended to impress the
monarchy under circumstances where the king believed himself God- appointed and infallible, no
matter his past or present policies, and matters were handled with delicacy. Yet, Smith's
arguments are clear enough (and certainly courageous enough) to be understood in laymen's
terms.
In an era when the very industry he's observing has been fostered by tariffs, monopolies,
labor controls, and materials extracted from colonies, he did his best to balance observation
with what he thought was best for society. It's not his fault we pick and choose our recipes
for what we do and don't believe or where we think Smith might have gone had he been alive
today.
The New Double Standard
The only practical way to resolve the contradiction between the existing beneficiaries of
state favoritism in this period and Smith's aversion to it is to observe that the means to
prevent competition and interference with the transition from one mode of commerce to another
that enhances the strength of the favored or provides a new means to grow their wealth is to
close the door of government intervention behind them and burn any bridges to it.
In psychological terms, the practice of "negative attribution" is to assume that identical
behavior is justifiable for oneself but not another. It may not be inconsistent with a system
of economics founded on self- interest, but it naturally begs a justification as to why it
rules out everyone else's self- interest. The beauty of this system is that it will
always have the same answer.
You may have guessed it.
Progress.
Reallocation of Assets
It was always understood that capitalism produces winners and losers. The art of economizing
is to gain maximum benefit for minimum expenditure, which generally translates to asset
consolidation and does not necessarily mean there is minimum sacrifice. There's an opportunity
cost for everything, whether it's human, financial, environmental, or material. But the most
important tenet of free market capitalism is that asset redistribution requires the U. S.
government to go to DEFCON 1, unless assets are being reallocated for "higher productivity," in
which case the entire universe is saved from the indefensible sin of lost opportunity.
Private property is sacred -- up until an individual decides he can make more productive use
of it and appeals to the courts for seizure under eminent domain or until the government
decides it will increase national growth if owned by some other person or entity. In like
manner, corporations can suffer hostile takeovers, just as deregulation facilitates predatory
market behavior and cutthroat competition promotes an efficiency orientation that means fewer
jobs and lower incomes, which result in private losses.
In the varying range of causes underlying the loss of assets, the common threat is progress
-- the "civilized" justification for depriving some other person or entity of their right to
own property, presumably earned by the sweat of their brow, except their sweat doesn't have the
same champion as someone who can wring more profit from it. The official explanation is that
the government manages the "scarcity" of resources to benefit the world. This is also how we
justify war, aggression, and genocide, though we don't always admit to that unless we mean to
avoid it.
Perfectly Rational Genocide
History cooperates with the definition of Enlightenment if we imagine that thoughtfulness
has something to do with genocide. In the context of American heritage, it has meant that when
someone stands in the way of progress, his or her resources are "reallocated" to serve the
pursuit of maximum profit, with or without consent. The war against Native Americans was one in
which Americans either sought and participated in annihilation efforts or believed this end was
inevitable. In the age of rational thought, meditation on the issue could lead from gratitude
for the help early settlers received from Native Americans to the observation they didn't
enclose their land and had no concept of private property,
to the conviction they were unmotivated by profit and therefore irreconcilable savages. But
it takes more than rational thought to mobilize one society to exterminate another.
The belief in manifest destiny -- that God put the settlers in America for preordained and
glorious purposes which gave them a right to everything -- turned out to be just the ticket for
a free people opposed to persecution and the tyranny of church and state.
Lest the irony elude you, economic freedom requires divorcing the state from religion, but
God can be used to whip up the masses, distribute "It's Them or Us" cards, and send people out
to die on behalf of intellectuals and investors who've rationalized their
chosenness.
CHAPTER TWO: INSTILLING THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE
Selfishness may be exalted as the root and branch of capitalism, but it doesn't make you
look good to the party on the receiving end or those whose sympathy he earns. For that, you
need a government prepared to do four things, which each have separate dictums based on study,
theorization, and experience.
Coercion:
Force is illegitimate only if you can't sell it.
Persuasion:
How do I market thee? Let me count the ways.
Bargaining:
If you won't scratch my back, then how about a piece of the pie?
Indoctrination:
Because I said so. (And paid for the semantics.)
Predatory capitalism is the control and expropriation of land, labor, and natural resources
by a foreign government via coercion, persuasion, bargaining, and indoctrination.
At the coercive stage, we can expect military and/ or police intervention to repress the
subject populace. The persuasive stage will be marked by clientelism, in which a small
percentage of the populace will be rewarded for loyalty, often serving as the capitalists'
administrators, tax collectors, and enforcers. At the bargaining stage, efforts will be made to
include the populace, or a certain percentage of it, in the country's ruling system, and this
is usually marked by steps toward democratic (or, more often, autocratic) governance.
At the fourth stage, the populace is educated by capitalists, such that they continue to
maintain a relationship of dependency.
The Predatory Debt Link
In many cases, post- colonial states were forced to assume the debts of their colonizers.
And where they did not, they were encouraged to become in debt to the West via loans that were
issued through international institutions to ensure they did not fall prey to communism or
pursue other economic policies that were inimical to the West. Debt is the tie that binds
nation states to the geostrategic and economic interests of the West.
As such, the Cold War era was a time of easy credit, luring postcolonial states to undertake
the construction of useless monoliths and monuments, and to even expropriate such loans through
corruption and despotism, thereby making these independent rulers as predatory as colonizers.
While some countries were wiser than others and did use the funds for infrastructural
improvements, these were also things that benefited the West and particularly Western
contractors. In his controversial work Confessions of an Economic Hit Man , John Perkins
reveals that he was a consultant for an American firm (MAIN), whose job was to ensure that
states became indebted beyond their means so they would remain loyal to their creditors, buying
them votes within United Nations organizations, among other things.
Predatory capitalists demand export- orientations as the means to generate foreign currency
with which to pay back debt. In the process, the state must privatize and drastically slash or
eliminate any domestic subsidies which are aimed at helping native industry compete in the
marketplace. Domestic consumption and imports must be radically contained, as shown by the
exchange rate policies recommended by the IMF. The costs of obtaining domestic capital will be
pushed beyond the reach of most native producers, while wages must be depressed to an absolute
bare minimum. In short, the country's land, labor, and natural resources must be sold at
bargain basement prices in order to make these goods competitive, in what one author has called
"a spiraling race to the bottom," as countries producing predominantly the same goods engage in
cutthroat competition whose benefactor is the West.
Under these circumstances, foreign investment is encouraged, but this, too, represents a
loaded situation for countries that open their markets to financial liberalization. Since, in
most cases, the
IMF does not allow restrictions on the conditions of capital inflows, it means that
financial investors can literally dictate their terms. And since no country is invulnerable to
attacks on its currency, which governments must try to keep at a favorable exchange rate, it
means financial marauders can force any country to try to prop up its currency using vital
reserves of foreign exchange which might have been used to pay their debt.
When such is the case, the IMF comes to the rescue with a socalled "bailout fund," that
allows foreign investors to withdraw their funds intact, while the government reels from the
effects of an IMF- imposed austerity plan, often resulting in severe recession the offshoot of
which is bankruptcies by the thousands and plummeting employment.
In countries that experienced IMF bailouts due to attacks on their currencies, the effect
was to reset the market so the only economic survivors were those who remained export- oriented
and were strong enough to withstand the upheaval. This means they remained internationally
competitive, which translates to low earnings of foreign exchange. At the same time that the
country is being bled from the bottom up through mass unemployment, extremely low wages, and
the "spiraling race to the bottom," it is in an even more unfavorable position concerning the
payment of debt. The position is that debt slavery ensues, as much an engine of extraction as
any colonial regime ever managed.
The Role of Indoctrination
The fact that it is sovereign governments overseeing the work of debt repression has much to
do with education, which is the final phase of predatory capitalism, concluding in
indoctrination. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the lesson to the world was that
socialism can't work, nor were there any remaining options for countries that pursued "the
third way" other than capitalism. This produced a virulent strain of neoliberalism in which
most people were, and are, being educated. The most high- ranking of civil servants have either
been educated in the West or directly influenced by its thinking. And this status of acceptance
and adherence finally constitutes indoctrination. The system is now self- sustaining, upheld by
domestic agents.
While predatory capitalism can proceed along a smooth continuum from coercion to persuasion
to bargaining to formal indoctrination, the West can regress to any of these steps at any point
in
time, given the perceived need to interfere with varying degrees of force in order to
protect its interests.
Trojan Politics
Democracy is about having the power and flexibility to graft our system of government and
predatory capitalism onto any target country, regardless of relative strength or conflicting
ideologies. An entire productive industry has grown up using the tools of coercion, persuasion,
bargaining, and formal indoctrination to maximize their impact in the arena of U. S. politics.
Its actors know how to jerk the right strings, push the right buttons, and veer from a soft
sell to a hard sell when resistance dictates war, whether it's with planes overhead and tanks
on the ground or with massive capital flight that panics the whole world.
When the U. S. political economy goes into warp overdrive, its job proves far more valuable
than anything ever made in the strict material sense because there's never been more at stake
in terms of what it's trying to gain. It's the American idea machine made up of corporations,
lobbyists, think tanks, foundations, universities, and consultants in every known discipline
devoted to mass consumerism, and what they sell is illusory opportunity dressed in American
principles. They embrace political candidates who'll play by elitist rules to preserve the
fiction of choice, and, in this way, they maintain legitimacy, no matter what kind of
"reallocation" is on the economic agenda.
The issue is not whether we'll question it, but who we'll applaud for administering it.
In the Information Age, perception management is king.
During the last weeks there was news that Turkey was hiring some
2,000 'Syrian rebels' to fight in
Azerbaijan against Armenian forces which since 1993 occupy Nagorno- Karabakh . Earlier today the
Azerbaijan forces and the mercenaries launched
their attack on Armenian lines. It was a massacre. Two Azerbaijani helicopters were shot
down. Some 10 tanks and armored troop transporters went up in flames . Azerbaijani
artillery hit some civilian structures in Stepankert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Turkish(?) drones hit Armenia front positions .
The Azerbaijani tactic seems to be to bunch up a lot of their tanks in the open field and to
wait for the Armenian artillery to destroy them. Russian troops are stationed in Armenia and
additional heavy support from Russia was flown in today . But Russia is
friendly with both countries and is already urging for an armistice. Armenia has mobilized its
forces and reinforcements are moving towards the front.
This is now, after Syrian and Libya, the third country in which the wannabe Sultan of Turkey
is trying to fight Russian supported forces. It ain't gonna work. But Erdogan has to keep on
doing that as a domestic diversion because the Turkish economy has screeched to a halt. The
recent central bank
rate hike is unlikely to stop the loss of the Lira but will deepen the recession.
The situation might well escalated from here on. There will be a lot of disinformation
coming from both sides.
Posted by b on September 27, 2020 at 12:55 UTC |
Permalink
Azerbaijan can't lift a finger without Ottoman backing. Armenia is traditionally a Russian
ally, and even though the current regime is wooing Amerikastan, it can't survive without
Russian protection. In any regular war Armenia will smash Azerbaijan flat but the Ottomans
are guaranteed to get involved. Now Russia and the Ottomans are on different sides in Libya
of course, Russia would back Greece in any conflict with Ankara, and increasingly Russia is
getting fed up with Ottoman attempts to annex North Syria. I can only surmise that this is an
Ottoman warning to Russia.
The claim the Azeri tanks were just sitting in a field waiting to be smashed by Russian
artillery etc. actually sounds like the Russians attacking first. The aggressor usually has
the initiative and thus usually has operational success in the opening round. It's
theoretically possible that a Russian artillery offensive was on high alert, waiting to
launch after a suitable "incident" which could be represented as an Azeri assault. Whatever
the value of mercenaries from a losing war, a few weeks is very unlikely to permit meaningful
incorporation into an actual fighting force. Therefore it is highly unlikely that their
reinforcement was the enabling cause of an Azeri assault.
It is a strange and marvelous world, where wonders delightful and horrible abound. So it
is barely possible the Azeris are terminally stupid, the underlying theory of the post. I
would still say that it's *not* because non-Christians are stupid. More likely it's because
the Azeris are getting their military advice from their friends the Russians.
IMO this reigniting of an old conflict comes as response to recent Kavkas 2020 maneuvers
organized by Russia which are taking place right now, with the participation of Armenia, and
also as response of last meeting between Zarif and Lavrov, in whose presser Lavrov was quite
explicit, at least more than before...
This comes, in the first place, as a new hot front ( apart from Belarus ) in the
post-Soviet space to implicate Russia and make her choose amongst two neighbors she gets
along with quite well, and at the same time, the transport of Syrian jihadi mercenary forces
in a charter flight by Turkey imply that a new abcess the size and type of Idlib is planned
to be inserted in the viccinity of both Russia and Iran, which will act as destablization
force for future incursions after US elections...
As we talk Azerbaijan is announcing advances in the Southern front and the take over of
some localities along Iranian border ...Why? What that has to do with Armenia? To implant
there the jihadis for the coming "proxy war" on Iran, the same way they were implanted in
Syria/Turkey northern East and West border and Syria/Lebanon Southern border...
Turkey here acting as US proxy PMC to position US managed and funded jihadi forces, as it has
done in Syria and Lybia...
Also the conflict comes to shoot two, or three, birds with the same shot by starting
another military conflict or destabilization process in the Silk & Road path...
This is the US MIC reasuring their rate of profit for the coming US presidency by
extending the perpetual war...
Although may well be that they will not even wait for the elections results...
On the importance of this new conflict and its obvious connection with Iran...See map in
thread linked above...Some more sources...Probable objective of past "color revolution" in
Armenia...on the grounds of "alleged" US chaotic state...chaos in the US acts as veil for its
own population ( so as thvey can not think of continuously started wars while they cop with
the immeidate miserable oticome of the pandemic...) and for opponents... who may think of
relaxing...Fortunately, Gerasimov, and IRGC, are always attentive...
THE SECOND WAR OF THE NAGORNO-KARABAJ HAS BREAKED In red the disputed region, in the center
of which is Stefankert, the capital. In blue the areas supposedly conquered by #Azerbaiyan.
Everything indicates that the Azeri offensive began by surprise in the early hours of
today, and has maintained a reasonable pace of advance
On the visible hand of Turkey in this reginition...no way Turkey is moving without NATO
consent...and even support...recall "international coalition of the willing to fight ISIS in
Syria"...which then turned into ISIS proxy war onto Syrian state and population...
I have
been checking and Azerbaijan announced in June that they were interested in buying TB2 from
Turkey. In no way have they been able to buy, receive and put the drones into operation in
such a short time. It starts to get cloudy.
Twitter turco está diciendo abiertamente que son sus drones. Mientras Clash Report,
que ya se ha comentado muchas veces que podría estar ligada a la inteligencia truca
(por el acceso que tienen a cierto material informativo) habla de que los drones son
Bayraktar TB2.
Shooting is common in Upper Karabakh...but not in Down Karabakh...this conflict as part of
war on Russian gas supply to Europe...
Although shooting is common in Upper Karabakh, a disputed area between Armenia and
Azerbaijan, this is the fastest escalation in recent times. Just hours after the last
incident, Armenia has declared martial law and total mobilization.
Let's not think that this is simply a local conflict between two countries: Azerbaijan
is backed by Turkey, while Armenia is backed by Russia. And to this we can add the natural
gas that comes to Europe from the Caspian.
In case someone wants to follow, Youtube channel of Armenian TV which sometimes biradcast
in Englisgh language...
In case anyone is interested in following him from the origin, YouTube channel with a live
signal from an Armenian television (at times they speak in English)
Well, sorry, posting too fast, as I must go now, and without time to check two
times...
It seems that tweets by #DragonLadyU2 got middle trnaslated...Repost correctly and with
blockquote, as it is not, as it could seem by the size of letter, info of mine, but of this
account who is following the issue of Azerbaijani drones purchase...
I was introducing it as:
On the visible hand of Turkey in this reginition...no way Turkey is moving without NATO
consent...and even support...recall "international coalition of the willing to fight ISIS in
Syria"...which then turned into ISIS proxy war onto Syrian state and population...
I have been checking and Azerbaijan announced in June that they were interested in buying
TB2 from Turkey. In no way have they been able to buy, receive and put the drones into
operation in such a short time. It starts to get cloudy.
Turkish Twitter is openly saying that it is their drones. While Clash Report, which has
already been commented many times that it could be linked to Turkish intelligence (due to
the access they have to certain informative material), talks about the drones being
Bayraktar TB2.
On preparations for this conflict, and who provoked whom...also reflected some intends of
transforming this inot religious conflict...which then would reginite the whole Caucasus and
Caspian region, and thus would end implying Iran and Russia...and probably palcing them in
different sides...which could be one of the objectives, to put a breach into very good
Russian/Iranian relations...Beware...
I'm reminded Israeli bizjet associated w secret flights was in Baku, Azerbaijan 3 days ago.
Landed back in Israel along w Azeri ministry of defense cargo
I have not been able to verify the arrival of Syrian fighters from the Turkish-backed
factions (SNA) in Azerbaijan as of now. I can confirm that dozens of fighters from NW Syria
(outside of regime control) left Syria via Turkey in an unknown direction about a week ago.
Families lost touch with these men since their departure. Rumored destinations include
Azerbaijan, Qatar, Turkey and Libya. I am in touch with families & friends of men who
left and will report once they manage to get in touch with their loved-ones.
About a month ago, rumors spread on WhatsApp among SNA fighters that they can register
to go to Azerbaijan. Many registered over WhatsApp, others apparently thru offices in the
Turkish-controlled areas.
The fighters registered due to the enticing rumored salaries of $2K-$2.5K
The SNA mercenaries who've gone to fight in Libya against Haftar were recruited with
direct involvement by Turkish officers who met with commanders of the SNA factions to
pressure them to send fighters. With the alleged Azerbaijan recruitment, there haven't been
such meetings.
It seems likely that the recruitment is being carried out by a Turkish private security
company that is also involved in shipping Syrians to fight in Libya. There is no need to
apply pressure on Syrians to leave anymore. The number of men wanting to go far exceeds
demand.
With time, the idea of being deployed oversees as a mercenary is becoming more socially
acceptable in Syria, in both communities residing outside of regime control (men in Idlib
have registered to go to Azerbaijan too) and in regime areas (where men are going to fight
for Haftar)
Syrian lives are regarded as expendable, with Syria serving as an arena to settle
geostrategic scores at Syrians' expense. Syrians resisted & still resist this logic,
but the collapse of the economy is prompting many Syrians to be willing to sell themselves
to the highest bidder.
div> I think that Jihadists have no nationality, therefore it is wrong to
label them as "Syrian"!
(1) re: tanks bunched up - the linked Armenian MOD twitter-video with the cheesy music and
2 tank hits ( this one ) suggests it is not
artillery? Recently dug cover beind them, but tanks mostly facing toward camera. Bulldozer
still there. Direct hits. You can see from the reaction of the tanks what they think is the
direction from which they were attacked. After the first hit, the next tank to be hit
attempted (unsuccessfully) to hide behind the remains of the tank already destroyed. The
others which were not already facing that way, turn their turrets toward the camera, which is
the direction from which they think they were attacked. They start making smokescreen as the
clip ends.
(2) We really don't need to see a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
(3) I don't really get the geopolitics of this. For Turkish strategic motivations, the
relevant oil/gas pipeline does not pass thru the contested territory although is quite close.
Not sure what to make of that. Map
here , with Nagorno-Karabakh colored in under Azerbaijan. Turkey is in danger of being
bypassed by Greece-Cyprus-Israel pipeline, how does this this help them in any way?
(4) For US-Iran conflict, just seems like general chaos. Perhaps there is a land route
from Russia-Georgia-Iran, but it can't be as good as the caspian sea route.
(5) for Greece-Cyprus pipeline, there may be a commercial benefit, if the reliability of
the Azerbaijan-Turkey route comes into question due to war or instability.
Looks like Turkey has gone rogue. Since the 2016 assassination attempt, Erdogan doesn't
trust NATO anymore.
As for (3), it's very straightforward: Turkey probably wants some symmetrical leverage
against Russia against the FUBARed situation in Idlib (which is draining Turkish coffers and
soldiers). They are probably very desperate, and are looking for something on these lines:
"look, Russia, you give us Idlib and we let Nagorno-Karabakh alone the next day. Deal?".
The Azeris making advances is to be expected if they had the aggressor's initiative. The post
implies the Armenians are winning handily, which is not to be expected when a prepared Azeri
offensive kicks off.
Armenia has long been on the US Regime Change hitlist - June/July 2015, July 2017, April 2018
when the Random Guy Pashinyan was imposed as leader. He has the tricky task of balancing the
demands of his owners versus the reality of Armenian interests.
p>
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One of the most vibrantly alive people I met, André Vltchek, just died . Though he barely
made it past his mid-fifties he got in a lot more living than a hundred average Americans who
live to collect their pensions. Allah yarhamhu.
In honor of this great Truth Jihadi we're replaying this 2018 interview:
The West claims to be the "free world" -- the global leader in human rights,
humanitarianism, and free expression. Globetrotting independent journalist André Vltchek , who joins us from Borneo,
isn't buying it. His latest
essay begins:
Western culture is clearly obsessed with rules, guilt, submissiveness and punishment.
By now it is clear that the West is the least free society on Earth. In North America and
Europe, almost everyone is under constant scrutiny: people are spied on, observed, their
personal information is being continually extracted, and the surveillance cameras are used
indiscriminately.
Life is synchronized and managed. There are hardly any surprises.
One can sleep with whomever he or she wishes (as long as it is done within the 'allowed
protocol'). Homosexuality and bisexuality are allowed. But that is about all; that is how far
'freedom' usually stretches.
Rebellion is not only discouraged, it is fought against, brutally. For the tiniest
misdemeanors or errors, people end up behind bars. As a result, the U.S. has more prisoners per
capita than any other country on Earth, except the Seychelles.
Andre taunted rightwing elites and illness – with a passion. I guess one of them
caught up.
Living hard seems like a death-wish, maybe it was. Staring at darkness messes people up
and he traveled again and again into the hearts of darkness across the planet because he
wanted to be a modern Wilfred Burchett. He was one of the greats. My condolences to his
family and friends.
Peace to Stephen Cohen too. You both will be missed.
André Vltchek was not an intellectual heavyweight. What is fascinating about his
life-story is how and who financed. That should be easy for insiders to fish out, and
insiders there be.
As to my humble opinion, Chomsky was neither. From all angles, his pre-fabricated
prestige, his in-group attitudes, his encrusted prestance, pettiness, pedantry, always within
convention, his factoid approach, the channels of communication, the lack of any systemic
approach, his "good guys bad guys" copper´ approach, did not warrant the few hours
listening in on his tune and omni-presence. His numb personality, contrary to the combative
Vltchek is noted as a minor.
Some "intellectuals" have half a page of original content in them over the course of a
life-time (not the same as career (n´est ce pas Pinker?)), most have none. "History
repeat itself", through the bull-horns of public intellectuals. They both practiced a sort of
journalism that is superficial (accent on the superficial) agenda driven.
Ex-CIA John Kiriakou stated that the CIA was attempting to recruit just about anyone that
they were able to starting in the sixties ranging from Hollywood actors/actresses, musicians,
writers, journalists, artists, business people, just about anyone. Operation Mockingbird is
still widely used even if it is no longer regerred to it as Operation Mockingbird.
André Vltchek (1962-2020) was the son of a Czech nuclear physicist father, and a
Russian-Chinese artist-architect mother, born in Soviet-era St Petersburg (then Leningrad).
He spent part of his childhood as well in the famous Czech beer city of Pilsen.
Western culture is clearly obsessed with rules, guilt, submissiveness and
punishment.
What culture is not? Every single population on Earth wants to survive, Westerners want
non-Aryans to survive, but the mechanism is always the same. The Stasi, the Gestapo, the CIA,
the KGB – they all breathed air, and they all tortured dissenters. Turkey was almost
overthrown in 2016. The Shah of Iran was, as were Hosni Mubarak and Gaddafi in Egypt and
Libya. Bashar is facing quite a lot of criticism for being free – that critique comes
in the form of bombs and jihadi freedom fighters. The Saudi Prince is wise for strangling and
beheading Khashoggi. The USSR disintegrated after they had shut down the GULAG.
As a result, the U.S. has more prisoners per capita than any other country on Earth,
except the Seychelles.
In 2012, the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in [the DPR of Korea] estimated 150,000 to
200,000 are incarcerated, based on testimonies of defectors from the state police bureau,
which roughly equals 600–800 people incarcerated per 100,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate
The World Prison Brief puts the United States' incarceration rate at 655 per 100,000.
Okay. If the West is the least free society on the planet, why the heck do all these
third-world people keep trying to move there? It is plain that Vltchek's thinking flunks the
real-world reality test.
The reality is, the rest of the world is worse off than the West, or people wouldn't keep
trying to leave the third world for the West.
@Anon ey want to have freedom of their stupid religious beliefs, not freedom from
religion. They still don't know that freedom of religion is not worth anything if it also
doesn't guarantee freedom from religion.
Thomas Jefferson tried very hard to explain this to them, but Yankee morons have never
learned what Jefferson tried to teach them. (With some notable exceptions, though, who,
however, have absolutely no political power.)
Vltchek is/was right: American/Western civilization [sic] (siphilization, rather) is
bankrupt and inhuman. It can only offer an abundance of material goods and military weapons
as if the only goals of human life were material things and warfare.
Sunday saw huge clashes erupt between the armies of Armenia and Azerbaijan along the already
militarized and disputed Nagorno-Karabakh border region. An official state of war in the region
has been declared by Yerevan.
"Early in the morning, around 7 a.m. the Azerbaijani forces launched a large-scale
aggression, including missile attacks..." Armenia's Defense Ministry stated Sunday. Armenia has
since reportedly declared martial law and a "total military mobilization" in what looks to be
the most serious escalation between the two countries in years.
Air and artillery attacks from both sides ramped up, with each side blaming the other for
the start of hostilities, while international powers urge calm. Crucially, civilians have
already been killed on either side by indiscriminate shelling . At least a dozen soldiers on
either side have also been reported killed.
Armenia's high command has ordered all troops throughout the country to muster and report to
their bases : "I invite the soldiers appointed in the forces to appear before their military
commissions in the regions," a statement said.
Armenia's military has released footage of significant tank warfare in progress. The below
is said to be Armenian army forces destroying Azerbaijani tanks:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/-mJffVrtPLk
And here's more from Sunday's fighting:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/D2jd1bw0AXQ?start=9
The recent conflict hearkens back to 2016, but before that to post-Soviet times. Christian
Armenia and Muslim Azerbaijan fought a war at that time in which at least 200 people were
killed over Armenian ethnic breakaway Nagorno Karabakh, which declared independence in 1991,
despite being internationally recognized as within Azerbaijan territory .
Dozens of civilians have already been injured Sunday in the major flare-up of fighting, as
CNN reports :
While Armenia said it was responding to missile attacks launched by its neighbor Sunday,
Azerbaijan blamed Armenia for the clashes.
In response to the alleged firing of projectiles by Azerbaijan, Armenian Prime Minister
Nikol Pashinyan tweeted that his country had "shot down 2 helicopters & 3 UAVs, destroyed
3 tanks."
Multiple dramatic battlefield videos are circulating on social media confirming the
large-scale deployment of tanks, artillery units, and airpower . Multiple Azerbaijani soldiers
have been
reported killed, but it's as yet unclear what casualty numbers could be.
Turkey's role in new fighting is attracting scrutiny. Its foreign ministry blamed Armenia
and called for it to halt military operations, however, it hardly appears to be a mere outside
or 'neutral' observer, given
new widespread reports Turkey has transferred 'Syrian rebel' units to join the fighting on
Azerbaijan's side .
These reports of Turkish supplied Syrian mercenaries began days ago, in what regional
analysts predicted would be a huge escalation in hostilities in the Caucuses.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan
late in the day slammed Turkey's meddling in the conflict . Ankara had called Armenia "an
obstacle" to peace after the fresh hostilities broke out. Yerevan has now formally confirmed
Turkey is supplying fighters .
Given the number of vital oil and gas infrastructure facilities and pipelines in the region
, impact on global markets could be seen as early as Monday.
"At least 16 military and several civilians were killed on Sunday in the heaviest clashes
between Armenia and Azerbaijan since 2016, reigniting concern about stability in the South
Caucasus, a corridor for pipelines carrying oil and gas to world markets," Reuters reports.
Azerbaijan has also declared an official state of martial law while clashes between the
armies are unfolding.
Meanwhile footage has emerged showing Armenia's nationwide mustering of its national and
reserve forces :
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"Pipelines shipping Caspian oil and natural gas from Azerbaijan to the world pass close to
Nagorno-Karabakh,"
Reuters reports. "Armenia also warned about security risks in the South Caucasus in July
after Azerbaijan threatened to attack Armenia's nuclear power plant as possible retaliation
."
The fighting is expected to grow fiercer along front lines in the disputed region into the
night as the prospect of a full 'state of war' is looming between the historic rivals.
Next, I absolutely have to mention the absolutely insane situation around Belarus .
To make a long story short, the EU wants to sanction Russia for intervening in Belarus while
that self-same EU is intervening in every possible imaginable manner: from the Poles who treat
Tikhanovskaia as a modern False Dmitri the Fifth (see here for a summary of Polish-run False
Dmitris), to the promise of a special "Marshall Plan for Belarus", to the coordination of all
the protests from Poland. The EU refuses to recognize Lukashenko as the winner (in spite of the
fact that there is exactly zero evidence suggesting that Lukashenko lost) and refers to
Tikhanovskaia as the "Leader of Belarus" (whatever that means).
As for our US American friends, having learned exactly nothing from the abject failure of
their Guaido coup in Venezuela, they now want to repeat exactly the same with Tikhanovskaia in
Belarus. As a result, Tikhanovskaia has been re-christened "Juanita Guaido"
But the worst are still the Europeans. Not only are they prostituting themselves to the
leaders of the Empire, the following countries were the first to declare that they will not
recognize Lukashenko as the leader of Belarus: Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia (which is no
surprise, they all compete for the title of most pro-US colony on the planet), but also
putatively mentally sane countries such as Germany, Czechia, Slovakia, Denmark. The case of
Germany is particularly amazing, because Germany will now be placed under immense pressure to
cancel North Stream 2, something which the entire German industry opposes. Eventually, the US,
Canada, the Ukraine, the UK and the entire EU joined in and also refused to recognize
Lukashenko as the leader of Belarus.
What is especially amazing to me is that these EU imbeciles apparently don't care that
without North Stream 2 they will have to purchase US gas, at much higher prices, which will
make the EU economy less effective than the US one. And I thought that prostitutes are always
acutely aware of the money they can make: not the European ones, apparently.
Still, I think that the "top honor" in this category goes to Poland which, while condemning
some undefined Russian intervention in Belarus, runs the NEXTA Telegram channel which runs
videos like this one: (in Russian – no, not in Belarusian, they know that 99.9999%
Belarussians speak Russian):
The tragedy of this situation the most of people who constitute fifth column will be
royally fleeced if this color revolution succeeds. As Ukrainian experience had shown the
immediate result will be the drop (2-3 times) of national currency against the dollar, mass
sellout of assets to the West at bargain process (for pennies on the dollar) as well as
continuation of the destruction of Soviet infrastructure. Western powers want 90% of
Byelorussian people to live on the level slightly above starvation and they have numerous
methods of achieving this goal directly and indirectly.
In two to three year Belorussia will be a regular debt slave of the West.
27 Sep, 2020 Around 200 have been detained as the Belarusian capital, Minsk and other cities
host rallies, during which the opposition plans to hold a "people's inauguration" of former
presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.
The action was called in response to the secret inauguration staged by long-time President
Alexander Lukashenko for himself earlier this week. Tikhanovskaya won't be attending the
protest, as she fled Belarus for Lithuania after the August 9 election, which the opposition
insists was rigged.
Thousands marched along Independence Avenue in Minsk, despite security forces thoroughly
preparing for the unsanctioned event and urging people to stay at home. Mobile internet speed
has been reduced in the capital. A local mobile operator said it has been ordered to do so by
the government. It may have been done to complicate communication among demonstrators.
The city's largest squares were blocked off, with seven subway stations in the center also
shut down. A convoy of armored vehicles has also been spotted outside Lukashenko's heavily
guarded residence.
Music was played from loudspeakers along the route of the march to drown out the chants of
the demonstrators, calling for Lukashenko's immediate resignation and a new, fair
election.
Police say that almost 200 people have been arrested in Minsk and other cities where
protests took place on Sunday.
The protests in Belarus have been marred by mass arrests from the very start, with
thousands of anti-government demonstrators detained in the weeks since the election. Police
have also been accused of using excessive force against demonstrators and mistreating
detainees. Three protesters have been killed during the unrest, according to official data,
with hundreds, including many officers, wounded.
Selfishness may be exalted as the root and branch of capitalism, but it doesn't make you
look good to the party on the receiving end or those whose sympathy he earns. For that, you
need a government prepared to do four things, which each have separate dictums based on study,
theorization, and experience. Coercion: Force is illegitimate only if you can't sell it.
Persuasion: How do I market thee? Let me count the ways. Bargaining: If you won't scratch my
back, then how about a piece of the pie? Indoctrination: Because I said so. (And paid for the
semantics.)
Predatory capitalism is the control and expropriation of land, labor, and natural resources
by a foreign government via coercion, persuasion, bargaining, and indoctrination.
At the coercive stage, we can expect military and/or police intervention to repress the
subject populace. The persuasive stage will be marked by clientelism, in which a small
percentage of the populace will be rewarded for loyalty, often serving as the capitalists'
administrators, tax collectors, and enforcers. At the bargaining stage, efforts will be made to
include the populace, or a certain percentage of it, in the country's ruling system, and this
is usually marked by steps toward democratic (or, more often, autocratic) governance.
At the fourth stage, the populace is educated by capitalists, such that they continue to
maintain a relationship of dependency.
The Predatory Debt Link
In many cases, post-colonial states were forced to assume the debts of their colonizers. And
where they did not, they were encouraged to become in debt to the West via loans that were
issued through international institutions to ensure they did not fall prey to communism or
pursue other economic policies that were inimical to the West. Debt is the tie that binds
nation states to the geostrategic and economic interests of the West.
As such, the Cold War era was a time of easy credit, luring postcolonial states to undertake
the construction of useless monoliths and monuments, and to even expropriate such loans through
corruption and despotism, thereby making these independent rulers as predatory as colonizers.
While some countries were wiser than others and did use the funds for infrastructural
improvements, these were also things that benefited the West and particularly Western
contractors. In his controversial work Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins reveals
that he was a consultant for an American firm (MAIN), whose job was to ensure that states
became indebted beyond their means so they would remain loyal to their creditors, buying them
votes within United Nations organizations, among other things.
Predatory capitalists demand export-orientations as the means to generate foreign currency
with which to pay back debt. In the process, the state must privatize and drastically slash or
eliminate any domestic subsidies which are aimed at helping native industry compete in the
marketplace. Domestic consumption and imports must be radically contained, as shown by the
exchange rate policies recommended by the IMF. The costs of obtaining domestic capital will be
pushed beyond the reach of most native producers, while wages must be depressed to an absolute
bare minimum. In short, the country's land, labor, and natural resources must be sold at
bargain basement prices in order to make these goods competitive, in what one author has called
"a spiraling race to the bottom," as countries producing predominantly the same goods engage in
cutthroat competition whose benefactor is the West.
Under these circumstances, foreign investment is encouraged, but this, too, represents a
loaded situation for countries that open their markets to financial liberalization.
If we allow the Black Lives Matter movement to become America's Bolshevik Revolution, we
will lose our liberty, and many of us will likely lose our lives, as well, for daring to
question them. This was never about racism. It has been about power anBlack Lives
Matter is a Modern Totalitarian Revolution
Classic totalitarian regimes share a number of common characteristics. The
rise of these regimes began with a cultural revolution, aimed at angering the citizens against
the current system. During that period domestic enemies are designated, and the people in the
radical movement aiming at overthrowing the old system rally together against those common
enemies, calling it a common struggle, as they adopt a new official ideology that stands
significantly apart from the old one. They seek to control every aspect of the lives of their
people, enlisting everyone they can to participate in the struggle. Even persons who may belong
to enemy classes or groups join up, hoping to receive mercy when the new regime gains control.
In Stalin's Russia and Mao's China the enemies were anyone who reminded them of the old system,
and anyone who could challenge them if left with enough power. The state enemies were the
capitalists, landlords, richer peasants and foreign agents of all kinds. Nazi Germany included
those outside the national community, which included socialists (even though Nazism was a form
of socialism) and communists, Jews, Christians, and any ethnic minorities that did not fit into
the German model of a loyal elite specimen.
The goal of each of the totalitarian regimes of the past were to eliminate the old system,
eradicate any history or remnant of the old regimes, and create a dominant single party that
stood as a rebellious alternative of the traditional State. Then, once in power, the perceived
enemies were murdered or imprisoned, as were many of their allies for the crime of knowing too
much. The younger generation was used as a controlling mechanism, taught to tattle on their
older counterparts for not being one hundred percent in favor of the new party in charge. The
youngsters were uniformed and organized into militias to turn their energies towards advancing
the party line, and improving upon the power of the new political elite.
In each case anything that even resembled the free market was eliminated, and the new
government controlled the economy. They took over the means of production either by taking
control of it and nationalizing it, or through heavy regulations (as we saw in Italy and
Germany). The immigration structure was altered, they orchestrated a break-down of morality and
what were considered moral norms in their culture, they worked on the destruction of the
nuclear family, they forcibly reallocated farmland, they formed a socialist economy that was
designed to redistribute the wealth away from the designated domestic enemies into the hands of
those revolutionaries who deserved some kind of reparations for what was allegedly lost at the
hands of the domestic enemies, and early on looting and rioting was encouraged and championed.
Interestingly, the list I just gave you was not just something the NAZIs and communists did,
but is also a list of demands currently being voiced by Black Lives Matter.
Public expression was also controlled by past dictatorial regimes so that no dissent could
emerge. If dissent was spotted, the party members acted as a mob, actively mobilized to quell
the dissent in the name of the "people's struggle" against a constant list of enemies. Again,
Black Lives Matter fits the bill on this one, too.
These regimes exaggerated real problems, and real aspects of human nature, and created an
on-going revolution against their enemies. It was a common struggle to liberate the people from
whomever the leadership designated as an enemy. To not pull the party line was to be socially
asleep, or an agent of the enemy, which then would place the person under great scrutiny, and
if they remained uncorrected, they would be ridiculed, shamed, and eventually jailed, or
murdered.
The fuel was passion, and anger, and a common demand for answers.
Sound familiar?
Black Lives Matter is an embodiment of everything that the 20th Century dictatorships
were
Eventually, Black Lives Matter will lose its appeal, and the players will grow weary of the
struggle. The regime will weaken, and when they try to invigorate their revolutionaries for a
new fight in order to strengthen the resolve of the regime and its followers, they will find
that all of their enemies are dead or in exile, and the problem can no longer be blamed on
others. However, it could take half a century, or more, before that happens, and in a Black
Lives Matter America the damage will already have been done. The death of liberty and the
annihilation of the free market will have left a long path of sorrow and misery following it.
By then, the enemy will only be themselves, and as all regimes in history, the struggle will
turn inward, and the murders will be against their own. Through the paranoia imaginary enemies
will be concocted, where nobody is safe from the suspicions of one's neighbors or children.
People begin to vanish, and the party begins to struggle to hold on to control.
Black Lives Matter, like all past dictatorial regimes, has successfully unleashed the
passions of many members of the public. The campaigns of terror are in full swing, in the name
of protesting, in the name of social justice, and in the name of standing against racism. They
claim that science and reason are in their corner, when, like Stalin and Mao of the Soviet
Union and Communist China, it is all a great big lie. They claim whites have unfair privilege
and must be forced to kneel to their true overlords, as Hitler did with the Jews when he
believed it would allow him to create a better Germany. In the end, as with all violent
totalitarian regimes, violence will bring them down just as violence brought them into
power.
Tucker on the incredible popularity of Black Lives Matter
Islamic totalitarianism solidifies in the Middle East, and works to spread across the
nations of Europe
As Islamic totalitarianism solidifies in the Middle East, and works to spread across the
nations of Europe, Black Lives Matter totalitarianism is working its way through its birthing
canal in the United States. Both bear all of the markers of totalitarianism. They work to
control the lives, speech, and actions of those below them. They terrorize and murder,
committing themselves to endless struggles against a long list of designated enemies. They pose
as more than an ideological challenge. They are poised to bring down Western Civilization,
which has prospered due to America's Liberty, and free market capitalistic system.
Should we fall, to where may one escape? There is no other place to go. Black Lives Matter
is a real threat, an enemy who desires to overthrow America and control this country. There is
no criticizing Black Lives Matter. The mobs threaten anyone who holds dissent. It is already
happening. People are losing their jobs for criticizing Black Lives Matter, and they are still
only a political movement. Black Lives Matter is enjoying complete immunity from criticism
while they are not in power. Imagine what will happen if they ever gain a hold on the reins of
our system.
It has gone beyond a demand for equality. Equality is no longer acceptable. If one were to
say "All Lives Matter," for example, that is now unacceptable, and racist. Only "Black Lives
Matter" we are told. White lives don't matter because of what your ancestors allegedly did a
couple hundred years ago. Christianity and the American System is based on the idea of equality
in the eyes of God, and equality in opportunity (or at least the attempt to create a system
that accomplishes such), but now if you say that out loud, you are called a racist, and your
very life could be at risk. Dissent is hate speech. You could be fired from your job, or in
some cases, fined and jailed for daring to speak out against the rising totalitarian regime
known as Black Lives Matter because such murmurings could be considered "hate speech".
The latest demand by Black Lives Matter is ridiculous, yet it is happening. It began with a
chant, "defund the police," and now has advanced to cries to abolish the police. The City of
Minneapolis is in the process of doing exactly that. When asked on CNN who, then, if the police
were gone, should we call in the middle of the night while our house is being burglarized,
a member of the Minneapolis city council said that the question "comes from a place of
privilege." In other words, if some feel like law enforcement is not on their side,
everyone should feel that way, otherwise, you have an unfair privilege, and you are racist.
Black Lives Matter is enjoying a rise to power largely because of the liberal media
Black Lives Matter is enjoying a rise to power largely because of the liberal media. Any
counter-arguments against their claims are going unheard. CNN, MSNBC, NPR, the alphabet
networks, and any of the other liberal outlets aren't going to report any criticism of Black
Lives Matter. And as Hitler's team explained, if you tell a lie often enough, it becomes the
truth. In this case, if you tell one side of the story, and the other side is never heard, it
becomes true.
Unchallenged claims must be true, therefore, Black Lives Matter must be on to something. The
polls say so.
Black Lives Matter is achieving their power in the same way past revolutionaries did.
Through force. They break things, they burn things, and they hurt anyone who gets in the way.
They believe they deserve whatever they want, and if you don't give it to them, they will take
it. Then, on the way out, they will set your business on fire. They occupy, they terrorize, and
nobody is willing to stop them, because if you do, you are a racist. They know this. They know
you are paralyzed by your fear of them, and fear of being considered racist. They have a
message. Step out of line and we will hurt you, your family, or your business. That is the
strategy of Black Lives Matter, and it is becoming the strategy of the Democrat Party. If you
are afraid to defy the mob, the mob rules.
The Framers of the U.S. Constitution created this system to protect us from the mob. That is
why they created a constitutional republic, not a democracy (as some people like to say).
Democracy is historically a transitional type of government. When the mobs of democracy begin
to take control, which usually accompanies a continuous vote for benefits from the treasury,
liberty breaks down and dictators begin to take control.
If we allow the Black Lives Matter movement to become America's Bolshevik Revolution, we
will lose our liberty, and many of us will likely lose our lives, as well, for daring to
question them. This was never about racism. It has been about power and control since the very
beginning. Black Lives Matter seeks to overthrow the U.S. Constitution, and replace our system
with a Marxist-based government that destroys liberty and the free market, and places their
radical leaders in control of the country. If we don't stop it, and recognize the revolutionary
nature of what is going on, America will disappear forever. And, if there is no America,
Liberty dies worldwide.
Douglas V. Gibbs of Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary,
has been featured on "Hannity" and "Fox and Friends" on Fox News Channel, and other television
shows and networks. Doug is a Radio Host on KMET 1490-AM on Saturdays with his Constitution
Radio program, as well as a longtime podcaster, conservative political activist, writ
Anatol Lieven's recent piece, How
the west lost , describes this moral defeat of the 'west' after its dubious 'victory' in
the cold war:
Accompanying this overwhelmingly dominant political and economic ideology was an American
geopolitical vision equally grandiose in ambition and equally blind to the lessons of
history. This was summed up in the memorandum on "Defence Planning Guidance 1994-1999," drawn
up in April 1992 for the Bush Senior administration by Under-Secretary of Defence Paul
Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and subsequently leaked to the media. Its central
message was:
...
While that 1992 Washington paper spoke of the "legitimate interests" of other states, it
clearly implied that it would be Washington that would define what interests were legitimate,
and how they could be pursued. And once again, though never formally adopted, this "doctrine"
became in effect the standard operating procedure of subsequent administrations. In the early
2000s, when its influence reached its most dangerous height, military and security elites
would couch it in the terms of "full spectrum dominance." As the younger President Bush
declared in his State of the Union address in January 2002, which put the US on the road to
the invasion of Iraq: "By the grace of God, America won the Cold War A world once divided
into two armed camps now recognises one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of
America."
But that power has since failed in the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, during the 2008
financial crisis and now again in the pandemic.
"For our part, we more than once described a balanced and mutually acceptable framework
for future agreements in this sphere during our contacts with the American negotiators. Aware
of the difficulties on the path forward in light of how widely different our approaches are,
we proposed extending the New START as it was originally signed.
"We do not want any unilateral advantages, but we will not make any unilateral concessions
either. A deal may be possible if the United States is ready to coordinate a new document on
the basis of the balance of interests, parity and without expecting Russia to make unilateral
concessions. But this will take time. We can have time to do this if the treaty is
extended."
As predicted, the Outlaw US Empire makes an offer it knows will be refused so it can then
blame Russia for being an unreliable negotiating partner--a trick we've all seen before.
If all the energy wasted on peddling Russiagate had instead been used to push real
political alternatives to Trump's programs the Democrats and their voters would likely be in
a better position.
The Ds defeated that possibility when they conspired to derail Sanders and promote
Clinton. As a result, Obama's legacy is Trump. But there was a Deep State faction pulling
Obama's strings that's likely supporting the attempt to foment a domestic Color Revolution,
yet for the life of me I can't see why as all the grifters are getting billions--unless--it's
perceived that Trump's stalled their imperialist projects or stopped what they hoped to
accomplish via JCPOA. In other words, we need a better motive for Russiagate than the mere
disruption of Trump's administration.
The Nexus is Ukraine, where the DNC, Obama and others were heavily involved with corruption,
money into their pockets and money laundered for campaign uses, illegally brought back into
the US.
It was never Russia or Russians. It was always the Podesta-Clinton-Obama operatives and
their true believers in FBI and DOJ, working with the Russophobes in NGOs and the State
Dept.
The desperation as Trump became a real possible President and then an actual elected
President was to cover their crimes in Ukraine and the illegal actions to spy on Trump and
set up Trump campaign associates.
The difficult call now is how high up do the present investigators have cover to save the
institutions of the FBI and DOJ? A real take down would go to Obama, Biden, Clapper, Comey,
Brennan, Podesta, Clinton and all their lieutenants. It would collapse the CIA, State, FBI,
DOJ, and all the lying experts on Russia who perjured to Congress.
Red Ryder gets it -- Ukraine is the specific catalyst, linked to the New Cold War against
Russia and the corruption of the Democrats involved in that conflict.
There is also Flynn and his dirt on Obama's Syria/ISIS policy -- remember his Al Jazeera
interview about Obama's "wilful decision" to ignore DIA reports on ISIS. Flynn knows the US
and its allies had some kind of links to ISIS and Nusra Front (Al Qaeda) in Syria.
And there is also the more general concern, raised by Karlof1, about the Presidency and
the empire.
I found this barb delivered by Lavrov during his presser with Zarif I linked to on the open
thread to be very curious when thought about in the context of Russiagate:
"The fact that the United States has threatened to impose sanctions on those who defy the
American interpretation of the current situation serves as further proof of Washington's
desire to move like a bull in a china shop, putting ultimatums to everyone and punishing
everyone indiscriminately because, in my view, the incumbent US administration has lost
its diplomatic skills almost for good ." [My Emphasis]
Red Ryder @8 & profk @10 connect Ukraine and the outing of the Empire's role in the
creation of Daesh. Yes, it seems much is related to Russia's Phoenix-like rise and outwitting
the Empire's buffoons beginning in 2013 that's generated the above behavior noted by Lavrov.
If TrumpCo does get a second term, unless the entire foreign policy team is dumped and
replaced, its agenda will go nowhere other than further into the hole they've dug for
themselves over the past 20 years--almost every nation is now against Bush's USA as many now
know who the terrorists really are and where they live.
What if the goal of 2016 election was to set up the 2020 American color revolution? If so
Trump needed to win. Obama and the FBI did the groundwork here at home. There is some debate
if the first Trump dossier was actually the second one to cover for the Cody Shearer one that
was given to Strobe Talbot to give to Christopher Steele. Still it had the same goal as to
foster doubt about the legitimacy of 2016 that is currently culminating with the gun toting,
fire bombing hissy fit of the children of liberal privilege. Now if those blasted supreme
righties would just show up, and the whole thing can go really hot like it did in Ukraine,
Libya, Egypt, almost Syria, and any country I might be forgetting. Notice the Trump
administration is parroting the left's white supremacist conspiracy. Its all really bad
theater, but does anyone really care the crumbing infrastructure and the looming economic
collapse when you can instead root for your team. Yes, I am guilty of the later too. Added
bonus we already have a twofer of enemies (Russian and China) for yet another elitist war.
I very doubt that it was "Russiagate" who make it difficult for Trump to pursue the policies
he had been advocating during his election campaign...In fact, "Russiagate" has long ago been
debunked and we have not seen Trump worrying a bit about the average American Joe, most
flagrant during this pandemic...I doubt he would had behaved different were the "Russiagate"
to have never existed..
Simply, electoral "promises" almost never are fullfilled in the already dating decades
neoliberal order, both from the right or the "alleged" liberal left...
On the same grounds, we could affirm then that conspiracy theories about Obama´s
birth place made it difficult for Obama to pursue the policies he had been advocating during
his election campaign....
That Trump has ties to Russian oligarchs is, to my view, out of doubt for anyone following
a bit some writers who use to deeply research their analyses out there like John Helmer....
That these oligarchas had anything to do, in this respect, with the Kremlin, it is doubtful,
but highly likely related to business shenanigans amongst them and Trump & Co...related
to illegal bribes and money laundering...
What have been largely proved is that Trump and his administration have been using big
data management corporations and social networks engineering to manipulate elections and give
coups eveywhere ( as the thorough research I posted at the Week in Review leaves in evidence
it happened in several countries in Latin America , which leads us to suspect that they would
not resist the desire to use the same methods in the US...before...and after the 2016
elections...having Bannon ad chief of campaign and then as chief of staff in 2016 so as that
does not add for tranquility, with what legal methods is respected for achieving whatever
goal..as the last events have clearly showed...
It was during Trump´s mandate that the war on Yemen continued towards total
erradication of Yemenis, especially of Shia belief, by indiscriminate bombing and blockade of
essential goods...that Qasem Soleimani was murdered without any justified reason...that NATO
started a cheeky build up in Russian borders who remained still free of it...that the US
withdrew from most international agreements leaving US/Russia, US/Iran, US/LatinAmerican
relations at its lowest levels, by underminig any remaining trust...Trump reinstated and made
even harsher sanctions against everybody who was not already a "puppet regime", including
Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina, Russia, Iran, China, and, even looping the loop, against puppet
governments in the EU...
I very doubt it was Russiagate which kept him from releasing his tax records as requested
by governance transparecny, returning the ammounts of money defrauded in the "University
Loans" affair, clarifying his ties to Epstein network, stopping sowing hatred and divide
amongst US population, build the most world wide network of far-right extremists since post
WWII around the world but especially in Europe to undermine what of "democracy" remains left,
labeled and declared as "terrorists" any political party abroad who does not go along and
oppose his puppet government´s corrupt policies anywhere, lit the Middle East on fire
by continuously provoking Iran, Lebanon, Syria, sent his regime envoys to the EU to twist arm
so that the European countries dedicate more budget to buy provedly ineffective arms from the
US when the money is most needed for socio-economic and health issues in the middle of a
pandemic, not to mention the requisition of health supplies´ cargos in the very Chinese
tarmac which had been previously ordered and bought by European countries which needed them
urgently, criminalized, and tried to label them as second cathegory citizens, a great part of
US population of non-white foreign descent through whose hard work and shameful labor
conditions US thrived along all these decades, well, you name it, the list would be almost
for a book...or two...
To blame all this mess on "Russiagate" is, well, in the best case, underestimating the
readership here...
Oh please, b: "legal jeopardy", don't make me laugh. It's been four years . The whole
political part of Trump's career he's been under the tutelage of mafia consigliere Roy Cohn.
Even better known, he's flown on the Lolita Express, and the FBI has a trove of videos etc
from Epstein's safe (hmm, what else does the latter have in common with Roy Cohn besides the
Trump connection). Bottom line, he's a deeply compromised individual who's concluded long
ago, and correctly, that he's in over his head and better off just playing along. He's had no
reservations appointing professional Russophobes like Fiona Hill; in fact, which of his
appointees has not been a Cold Warrior besides perhaps T-Rex, who was a mere Venezuela
hawk because of some old Exxon bad blood, and who was quickly ditched anyway. Even now, his
own FBI director spouts RussiaGate red meat, and the Donald is doing squat about it.
What does it all matter to Trump? He doesn't have a good name to clear. He didn't run for
president expecting to win, let alone to carry out this or that specific program. This
Vale Tudo carnival atmosphere clearly suits him: if his opponents can make baseless
accusations, so can he. If they can expect to skate beyond some meaningless fall guys, so can
he. To actually uphold the law--it's just not how he rolls.
Had he mostly contented himself with playing president on TV and enjoying the perks of the
office, and understood you can't just let a pandemic kill off your own voters, all would've
been dandy. But, predictably, his ego got the better of him, and he just had to be the
statesman who was finally going to bring China to heel. Again, merely tweeting about it
could've been ignored, but by appointing an array of rabid ideologues who went to work on
"decoupling", he's sided with a Deep State which will hate him regardless, against
Corporate America which went into China to, you know, make money. In this way, he's made
himself enemies a Republican can ill afford; combine this with his personal style (or lack of
it), and just about nobody has his back any more. So the machine goes about purging this
alien body from its system.
when do the American people get to investigate Truman, Ike, John McCain, JFK, Johnson, Bush,
Obama, FBI, Trump, 9/11, CIA, invasion of Iraq, wall street, the US Treasury, the military,
Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and the like..?
,==He did it==> he did not do it, <=someone else did it, ==>avoids the basic
problem:
America has a government that
a.) conducts wars to protect the economic interest of its favored few.
b.) uses law , to grant feudal lords wealth creating by extracting bits of wealth from
Americans.
c.) conducts nearly all its affairs in classified secret..
d.) is un accountable for the money it spends.
e.) is un accountable for the genocides it conducts in foreign lands.
f.) has two crime families which divide and conquer the citizens to control all election
outcomes
g.) has given to private bankers, its power to print money, control the economy, and tax the
people.
h.) has not adhered to the Bill of Rights or the un amended constitution.
i.) refuses to require private media to speak only the truth.
j.) Refuses to comply with and orto enforce the 1st and 4th amendment<=papers and effects
t/b secure
expand this list as you like
and
Americans have
a.) no access to the USA. <= 3 votes, insolation of state or voting district,
out 527 positions don't get it & none for the President
b.) must pay to the USA taxes and have no input as to how such taxes are collected or
used,
c.) must register their presence to the USA with id numbers
d.) must obey USA laws which Americans had no say in writing, or passing.
e.) must endure foreign wars and domestic programs that serve no legitimate domestic
interest.
expand this list as you like.
You are onto something there...I do not recall whose US think tank analyse I read about US
youth tending ideologically to the left...the same could be said of any youth around the
world after they have been left without future prospect and past opportunities to rise
through the social ladder by rampant savage neoliberal capitalism...
I said at the time that the Ukrainian experiment of 2014 was a general dressed rehearsal
for a future planned authoritarian fascist rule in most of the world, especially the West,
once the prospects, already known by the elites, of collapsing capitalism are obvious for the
general public and cause the consequent uprising..It is in this context that the pandemic and
its sudden impoverishing outcome fits, along with the "orchestrated" violent riots at various
locations, to justify martial law...
Notice that "rewritting of history of WWII" in favor of fascism is a feature of any US
administration since the fall of the USSR...
Past days I read that Roger Stone, former Trump advisor, if i am not wrong also implied in
a corruption case, advised Trump to declare martial law after winning in Novemeber...It is in
that context that all the noise we have been hearing all these past months about the riots,
militias, coups, and so on fit...What we have not heard about is about hundreds of thousands
of evictions, inacabable line ups for food banks, and the total socio-economic disaster more
than anything willingly built by TPTB...
Recal that they "built their own reality, and when you are catching up with that reality,
they build another one"...
It is difficult to teach old chickenhawk a new tricks. Looks like she is a real "national
security parasite" and will stay is this role till the bitter end.
"America's world management, NATO, the European Union and the construction of establishments and
alliances the US constructed after World War II have taken a hit." took hit because of the crisis of neoliberalism
not so much because of Russia resistance to the USA neoliberal domination and unwillingness to became a vassal state a la EU
states, Japan and GB.
Her hostile remark confirms grave mistake of allowing immigrants to occupy high position in the US foreign policy hierarchy.
They bring with themselves "ancient hatred"
Only a blind (or a highly indoctrinated/brainwashed) person is unable to see where all these neocon policies are leading...
Notable quotes:
"... America's world management, NATO, the European Union and the construction of establishments and alliances the US constructed after World War II have taken a hit ..."
"... "They lost the entire US political class ..."
Fiona Hill, the National Security Council's senior director for European and Russian affairs
till 2019, says divisions are rising inside the Kremlin over the knowledge of persevering with
a "dirty tricks" marketing campaign that's had combined outcomes and will now face diminishing
returns.
On the one hand, Russia's 2016 affect operations succeeded past the Kremlin's wildest goals.
The US-dominated, unipolar world that Putin has lengthy railed in opposition to is now not.
America's world management, NATO, the European Union and the construction of establishments and
alliances the US constructed after World War II have taken a hit. "On that ledger, wow, yes,
basically over-fulfilled the plan," mentioned Hill.
At the identical time, getting caught in the act of making an attempt to sabotage US
democracy has proved pricey. "They lost the entire US political class and politicized ties so that the whole future of
US-Russia relations now depends on who wins in November," she mentioned.
Probably counting on the desperate vanity and ego of Trump with the looming election to not
shorten the length of the leash on Pompass. Pompass must also have noticed that Trump is
willing to shove the homeland into civil war in order to claim victory, so maybe Pompass
finally has the latitude to slake his bloodthirstiness.
Since I'm wondering down the path of speculation, a bit further into the murk. If there is
one thing that characterizes the US today from the highest to the low, it is corruption. I
submit that this corruption finds its zenith in the military, and especially the procurement
train: any engagement with a near-peer (or the coalition/bloc we're talking about here,) and
the rot and corruption will collapse this empire in upon itself. I've had this suspicion for
some time, and believe if the going got rough the collapse would come rather quickly and
completely.
Following a long line of very arrogant american imperial "negotiators", mr oblivion
billingslea used standard "negotiating" techniques like
(a) accusing the other side of crimes Americans have committed first and forever, eg,
extreme lying, bad faith argumentation, military aggression, foreign government security
breaching, assassination and poisoning [as in american presidents and independent thinkers],
and of course, electoral cheating;
(b) putting the opponent in the "negotiation process" on the defensive or back foot by
stating false news allegations amplified by the media controlled by the american empire;
(c) offering nothing useful or commitable to be done by the empire, and yet
"magnanimously" demanding the moon as opponents' concessions, eg, russian, iranian and
chinese nuclear weapons limits, but not for nato's development and deployment, and; (d) after
making impossible demands, the imperials accuse the opponents of hostility and unwillingness
to "negotiate".
The russians can skillfully agree by stating that they only require the americans to
reduce their nukes to 320 pieces like china, and in less than five years.
This is why it is very important for sovereign nations to read the guidebook, called the
"idiot's guide on running the american empire", and developing deep and lasting
solutions.
As for the other american imperial military "advantages", eg, constellation of
"aggression" satellites, andrei forgot to mention that these can be shot or burned down in
minutes easily by russia, china and even iran, as these stations cannot hide or run away in
earth orbits.
Replenishment of weapons and military supplies after 3 months is rather doomed as the
cheap, mass production and manufacturing facilities do not exist. Which must be re-created
somehow but now
American lands are the targets. Much, Much Different Than WW2 !!
And of course, russia can always nuke down the USA and its vassal countries, and thus
permanently ruin their economies for a decade or more, they don't know how to run defense --
this was always the fatal weakness of all bullies - if they'll have enough time to "learn
it"... let's see... I doubt this.
Let's see americans try to start and conduct a nuclear war after too many spy, internet
and gps satellites are shot down. Russia can even do this today using conventional
explosives, and the world will be shocked how helpless the american military and economy can
be made even without using russian nukes.
There are countries still immune to the numerous american imperial diseases that are
already documented daily in zerohedge postings. The better countries still have lots of
parents telling their kids to study and work hard so they can have better lives than their
ancestors.
In oregon and california, they teach unemployable kids to burn something or somebody
sometime before dinner.
CdVision • 11 hours ago
I was about to say that what now comes out of the US & Trump's mouth in particular, is
Orwellian. But that credits it with too much gravitas. The true comparison is Alice in
Wonderland:
"Words mean whatever I want them to mean".
Reminiscence of the Future.. ( http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2020/09/russia-steals-everything.html)
Russia "Steals Everything" !! (Not just China, oops... ???!!!!)
And Jesus Christ was an American and was born in Kalamazoo, MI. It is a well-known fact. So
Donald Trump, evidently briefed by his "utterly competent and crushingly precise aids", knows
now that too! !!! LOL
> US President Donald Trump claims that Russia developed hypersonic weapons after
allegedly stealing information from the United States.
> According to him, "Russia received this information from the Obama administration,"
Moscow "stole this information." Trump said that "Russia received this information and then
created" the rocket, reports TASS.
> "We have such advanced weapons that President Xi, Putin and everyone else will envy
us. They do not know what we have, but they know that it is something that no one has ever
heard of. "
->We are the foremost and always number one. Everything is invented only by us, the
rest can only either steal, or be gifted with our developments for good behavior. This
situation is eternal, unchanging, everyone lags behind American Tikhalogii at least 50 years
(the time frame was chosen so that even a 20-year-old would lose heart, "what's the point of
trying to catch up, it won't work anyway, in my lifetime"). It was, is, and will be, this is
the natural course of events.
All this is delivered in the format of the classic Sunday sermon of the American
provincial Protestant church, coding the parishioners for further deeds and actions. And it
worked effectively, creating in some basalt confidence "we are better because we are better",
in others - "I don't mind anything for joining this radiant success, I'm ready for anything,
I'll go for any hardships and crimes, if only There".
Only now it worked. In a situation where the frequency of pronouncing such mantras is more
and more, emotions are invested in them too, but in fact everyone understands that this is
what autohypnosis does not work.
The poor have stolen from the United States, if you look at it, literally everything. And
5G and the superweapon of the gods. Moreover, a pearl with a characteristic handwriting is
not copy / paste, but move / paste, you bastards. Therefore, the United States does not even
have any traces of developments left - the guys just sit in an empty room, shrug their hands,
"here we have a farm of mechanical killer dolls, with the faces of Mickey Mouse overexposed,
and now look - traces of bast shoes and candy wrappers from "Korkunov" only, ah-ah-ah, well,
something like that, ah. "
At the same time, there are no cases of sabotage, espionage - whole projects were simply
developed, developed, brought to a working product, and then the hob - and that's it, and
disappeared. And this became noticeable only after years. And all the persons involved are
like "wow, wow."
Psychiatric crazy fool of the head, no less.
But due to the fact that all of the above theses are driven very tightly into the template
for the perception of the world, both those who voiced these theses and the listeners are
satisfied.
Because the post-American post-hegemonic world is not terrible because in some ratings
another country will be higher there, and Detroit will never be rebuilt "as it was". It is
scary because it is not clear how to live for people who had no support in the form of global
goals, faith, philosophy of life, and all this was replaced by narcissism on the basis of
"successful success is my second self".
This means that the moment when this issue has to be resolved must be delayed to the last.
Leaving the whole topic on the plane "we were offended, we are offended, we were dishonest,
which means we have the right to any action" is not a bad move.
It's a pity that it doesn't really affect the essence of what is happening.
"... Accompanying this overwhelmingly dominant political and economic ideology was an American geopolitical vision equally grandiose in ambition and equally blind to the lessons of history. This was summed up in the memorandum on "Defence Planning Guidance 1994-1999," drawn up in April 1992 for the Bush Senior administration by Under-Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby ..."
"... In the early 2000s, when its influence reached its most dangerous height, military and security elites would couch it in the terms of "full spectrum dominance." ..."
"... Bhadrakumar describes how the 'west', through its own behavior, created a mighty block that now opposes its dictates. He concludes ..."
"... Quintessentially, Russia and China contest a set of neoliberal practices that have evolved in the post-World War 2 international order validating selective use of human rights as a universal value to legitimise western intervention in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. On the other hand, they also accept and continuously affirm their commitment to a number of fundamental precepts of the international order -- in particular, the primacy of state sovereignty and territorial integrity, the importance of international law, and the centrality of the United Nations and the key role of the Security Council. ..."
"... The rules are follow the dictates of our western neo-colonial institutions like the World Bank, the IMF et all. ..."
"... Its a pretty simple concept backed by the attack dog of the US military. ..."
"... 'Rules based order' was always a euphemism for exceptionalism of one kind or another. The term was invented to avoid having to say 'rule of law', which invited criticism because even the most minimal amount of law (such as Geneva conventions, ICC etc) was rejected in practice and in policy by the leading members of the actually existing world order. ..."
"... Rumor says the "Wolfowitz Doctrine" also envisioned the balkanization of Russia (the document is still classified, but it leaked to a NYT journalist at the time, who published a report on it). ..."
"... It is not over in the sense that the West hasn't given up in its attempts to take over the world. But as the "exceptionalist" western countries decline, they will go even crazier and crazier and there will be full blown hysteria. ..."
"... In this sense, the rule based order will be over as there will be only disorder and animalistic, crazed western rage and bullying. The West is like a trapped animal. It will start pouncing, raging and snarling like a wild animal. This is the real nature of the West. A hungry wild animal that needs to feed. ..."
"... But behind the liberal mask, there are hateful eyes and gnashing teeth, and hunger and greed for other people's resources. ..."
"... Expressed in words, the West's face says "I'm the best and you are nothing! Give me your stuff! And this is how it will forever be!" ..."
"... As Putin has said, the US is no longer agreement capable. ..."
"... Instead of bringing Russia into the Western liberal democracies (with the threat of major nuclear war now drastically reduced) the now Anglo-Zionist Empire just looted it. ..."
"... Actually the Trump Administration has done far more against Russia than all US administrations from the last 30 years. Do not listen what they say, look at what they do. Right now the US in a full blown Cold War with Russia with ever increasing attacks ..."
"... Rules based international order .... the U.S. functions as the the Supreme Court for the U.N. , 'we have invoked snapback sanctions and extended the arms embargo on Iran indefinitely and are enforcing it'. UN, 'but your vote failed'. ..."
"... Rules based International Order is the dog whistle for global private finance controlled economies. It is sad that we are in a civilization war with China/Russia about who runs international finance going forward and yet there is no discussion of the subject but instead all sorts of proxy conflicts. ..."
"... The US is not just facing relative decline -- the fact that others are catching up in key ways. The US is also facing absolute decline -- the fact that it is suffering a degradation of capacities and is losing competitive battles in key areas. Examples of absolute decline include the Russian and Chinese military-technological revolutions based on anti-ship and hypersonic missiles and air defense systems; Chinese 5G; China's demonstrative success in suppressing COVID and its overall manufacturing power; the declining quality of life for most Americans; and the collapse of American institutional competence. ..."
"... Related to this, we can't separate these dynamics from the political economy of the states in question. China, in particular, is showing that an interventionist state, with high levels of public ownership, is essential to qualitative power, human security, and economic and social development. ..."
"... Psssst, learning Russian is easier than Chinese and we already know a few Russian words, such as novichok. ..."
"... Russia after the Cold War was a shambles and today it remains a weak economy with a limited role on the world stage, concerned mainly with retaining some of its traditional areas of influence. China is a vastly more formidable competitor. If the US (and the UK, if as usual we tag along) approach the relationship with Beijing with anything like the combination of arrogance, ignorance, greed, criminality, bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which western elites managed the period after the Cold War, then we risk losing the competition and endangering the world. [my emphasis] ..."
"... It is not over in the sense that the West hasn't given up in its attempts to take over the world. ..."
"... The contest between the Empire and the upstarts is not over by a long shot. What the West HAS lost is the "inevitability" argument. But for the upstarts to actually prevail in their "multi-lateral" vision, they have to actually entice countries to join them despite threats and intimidation from the Empire. ..."
"... The Empire's power-elite KNOW that Russia, China, and allies of Russia-China don't want to be subject to their "rules-based order". The Empire is actively working to undermine, subvert, and divide the countries that oppose it. While also securing their own territories/population via intimidation and propaganda. ..."
"... On rules based disorder and the capitulation of Merkel and her BND lapdogs to the 'hate Russia' fulminations of the UKUSA morons. I see that the German Parliament has NOT TAKEN its red pills these days and is reluctant to swallow the BS. ..."
"... My late father as an army officer prosecuted Japanese war criminals for their atrocities now the Anglo-Zionists are the pre-eminent war criminals and their leaders loudly proclaim "our values" as a pathological and propagandistic form of projection. Is it possible they are unaware of their blatant hypocrisy ? ..."
"... There is no "international law" and no "international order." There is only relative power. And when those powers clash, as seems inevitable, the world is in for a major nuclear war, and probably preceded by several more regional wars. Meanwhile, the US internally is collapsing into economic disaster, social unrest, political and social oppression, infrastructure failure, and medical disasters. We'll probably be in martial law sometime between November 3 and January 21 if not beyond that period, just for starters. ..."
"... America's "Rules-Based International Order" is a Goebbelsian euphemism for a Lies-Based Imperial Order, led by the USA and its war criminal allies (aka the self-styled Free World). ..."
"... The true nature of this America-led order is exposed by the USA's war of aggression against Iraq (which violated international law and had no United Nations sanction) and its decades-long War on Terrorism, which have murdered hundreds of thousands of people and maimed, immiserated, or refugeed millions of more people. ..."
"... The Empire is very much alive and dangerous. Ask Iran, ask Syria, as the Palestinians, ask the Russians, ask the Chinese. Ask numerous African nations. Even Pangloss was not so stupidly naive. ..."
"... quite right. 'Rules based order' was always a euphemism for exceptionalism of one kind or another. ie US and its "allies" is basically asking the rest of the world to finance their (the US et al) version of a welfare state. ..."
"... China and rest of the worlds foreign central banks stopped growing their foreign exchange reserves (on net) in 2014 leaving the US in a sort of limbo. ..."
"... "Major powers maintaining cooperation, at least not engaging in Cold War-style antagonism, is the important foundation of world peace. China is committed to maintaining cooperation among major powers, as well as being flexible in the balance of interests acceptable to all parties. The problem is the Trump administration is hysterically shaping decoupling and confrontation between Beijing and Washington, and has been mobilizing more forces to its side at home and abroad. Those US policymakers are deliberately splitting the world like during the Cold War. ..."
"... The first 'Cold War' was entirely contrived. The US knew the Soviet Union was weak and had no agenda beyond maintaining security and its own reconstruction after WW2. There was no threat of a Western European invasion, or of the USSR spreading revolution globally. All that Cold War ideology is a lie. And the same lying is taking place about China today. No difference. ..."
"... It's good to see discussion here of the nefarious role of the American far-right neocon warmongers in the State Department, intelligence services and military leadership just before the turn of the new century. What I have never seen clearly explained, however, is the connection between these very dangerous forces and the equally cynical and reactionary Israeli politicians and the Mossad, as well as Saudi Arabian officials. ..."
The 'western' countries, i.e. the United States and its 'allies', love to speak of a 'rules based international order'
which they say everyone should follow. That 'rules based order' is a way more vague concept
than the actual rule of law:
The G7 is united by its shared values and commitment to a rules based international order.
That order is being challenged by authoritarianism, serious violations of human rights,
exclusion and discrimination, humanitarian and security crises, and the defiance of
international law and standards.
As members of the G7, we are convinced that our societies and the world have reaped
remarkable benefits from a global order based on rules and underscore that this system must
have at its heart the notions of inclusion, democracy and respect for human rights,
fundamental freedoms, diversity, and the rule of law.
That the 'rules based international order' is supposed to include vague concepts of
'democracy', 'human rights', 'fundamental freedoms', 'diversity' and more makes it easy to
claim that this or that violation of the 'rules based international order' has occurred. Such
violations can then be used to impose punishment in the form of sanctions or war.
That the above definition was given by a minority of a few rich nations makes it already
clear that it can not be a global concept for a multilateral world. That would require a set of
rules that everyone has agreed to. We already had and have such a system. It is called
international law. But at the end of the cold war the 'west' began to ignore the actual
international law and to replace it with its own rules which others were then supposed to
follow. That hubris has come back to bite the 'west'.
Anatol Lieven's recent piece, How
the west lost , describes this moral defeat of the 'west' after its dubious 'victory' in
the cold war:
Accompanying this overwhelmingly dominant political and economic ideology was an American
geopolitical vision equally grandiose in ambition and equally blind to the lessons of
history. This was summed up in the memorandum on "Defence Planning Guidance 1994-1999," drawn
up in April 1992 for the Bush Senior administration by Under-Secretary of Defence Paul
Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and subsequently leaked to the media. Its central
message was:
...
While that 1992 Washington paper spoke of the "legitimate interests" of other states, it
clearly implied that it would be Washington that would define what interests were legitimate,
and how they could be pursued. And once again, though never formally adopted, this "doctrine"
became in effect the standard operating procedure of subsequent administrations. In the early
2000s, when its influence reached its most dangerous height, military and security elites
would couch it in the terms of "full spectrum dominance." As the younger President Bush
declared in his State of the Union address in January 2002, which put the US on the road to
the invasion of Iraq: "By the grace of God, America won the Cold War A world once divided
into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of
America."
But that power has since failed in the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, during the 2008
financial crisis and now again in the pandemic. It also created new competition to its role due
to its own behavior:
On the one hand, American moves to extend Nato to the Baltics and then (abortively) on to
Ukraine and Georgia, and to abolish Russian influence and destroy Russian allies in the
Middle East, inevitably produced a fierce and largely successful Russian nationalist
reaction. ...
On the other hand, the benign and neglectful way in which Washington regarded
the rise of China in the generation after the Cold War (for example, the blithe decision to
allow China to join the World Trade Organisation) was also rooted in ideological arrogance.
Western triumphalism meant that most of the US elites were convinced that as a result of
economic growth, the Chinese Communist state would either democratise or be overthrown; and
that China would eventually have to adopt the western version of economics or fail
economically. This was coupled with the belief that good relations with China could be
predicated on China accepting a so-called "rules-based" international order in which the US
set the rules while also being free to break them whenever it wished; something that nobody
with the slightest knowledge of Chinese history should have believed.
The retired Indian ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar touches on the same points in an excellent
series about the new Chinese-Russian alliance:
Bhadrakumar describes how the 'west', through its own behavior, created a mighty block that
now opposes its dictates. He concludes:
Quintessentially, Russia and China contest a set of neoliberal practices that have evolved in
the post-World War 2 international order validating selective use of human rights as a
universal value to legitimise western intervention in the domestic affairs of sovereign
states. On the other hand, they also accept and continuously affirm their commitment to a
number of fundamental precepts of the international order -- in particular, the primacy of
state sovereignty and territorial integrity, the importance of international law, and the
centrality of the United Nations and the key role of the Security Council.
While the U.S. wants a vague 'rules based international order' China and Russia emphasize an
international order that is based on the rule of law. Two recent comments by leaders from China
and Russia underline this.
China firmly supports the United Nations' central role in global affairs and opposes any
country acting like boss of the world, President Xi Jinping said on Monday.
...
"No country has the right to dominate global affairs, control the destiny of others or keep
advantages in development all to itself," Xi said.
Noting that the UN must stand firm for justice, Xi said that mutual respect and equality
among all countries, big or small, is the foremost principle of the UN Charter.
No country should be allowed to do whatever it likes and be the hegemon or bully, Xi said.
"Unilateralism is a dead end," he said.
...
International laws should not be distorted or used as a pretext to undermine other countries'
legitimate rights and interests or world peace and stability, he added.
The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov went even further by outright rejecting the 'western rules' that the 'rules
based international order' implies:
Ideas that Russia and China will play by sets of Western rules under any circumstances are
deeply flawed , Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with New
York-based international Russian-language RTVI channel.
"I was reading our political scientists who are well known in the West. The following idea
is becoming louder and more pronounced: it is time to stop applying Western metrics to our
actions and stop trying to be liked by the West at any cost . These are very reputable people
and a rather serious statement. It is clear to me that the West is wittingly or unwittingly
pushing us towards this analysis. It is likely to be done unwittingly," Lavrov noted.
"However, it is a big mistake to think that Russia will play by Western rules in any case,
just like thinking this in terms of China."
As an alliance China and Russia have all the raw materials, energy, engineering and
industrial capabilities, agriculture and populations needed to be completely independent from
the 'west'. They have no need nor any desire to follow dubious rules dictated by other powers.
There is no way to make them do so. As M.K. Bhadrakumar concludes
:
The US cannot overwhelm that alliance unless it defeats both China and Russia together,
simultaneously. The alliance, meanwhile, also happens to be on the right side of history.
Time works in its favour, as the decline of the US in relative comprehensive national power
and global influence keeps advancing and the world gets used to the "post-American century."
---
P.S.
On a lighter note: RT , Russia's state sponsored international TV station, has recently
hired Donald Trump
(vid). He will soon host his own reality show on RT . The working title is reportedly:
"Putin's Apprentice". The apprenticeship might give him a chance to learn how a nation that has
failed can be resurrected to its former glory.
Posted by b on September 22, 2020 at 17:59 UTC | Permalink
The Liberal International Order or Pax Americana are synonyms for The
Rules Based Order. The plan that was followed for years was the outline given by Zbigniew
Brzezinski and the Trilateral Commission in The Grand Chessboard to "contain" the ambition of
Russia, China, and Iran over their interest to expand into Central Asia and the Middle East.
Brzezinski changed
in 2016, so did Kissinger, Brzezinski wrote that it was time to make peace and to integrate
with Russia, China and Iran. But the elites had changed by then, newer people had taken
over and no longer followed Brzezinski.
The rules are follow the dictates of our western neo-colonial institutions like the World
Bank, the IMF et all. We will own you and you will do what we say and those are the rules.
Any challenge to our authority will lead to war, economic ruin or both.
Its a pretty simple concept backed by the attack dog of the US military.
'Rules based order' was always a euphemism for exceptionalism of one kind or another.
The term was invented to avoid having to say 'rule of law', which invited criticism
because even the most minimal amount of law (such as Geneva conventions, ICC etc) was
rejected in practice and in policy by the leading members of the actually existing world
order.
Rumor says the "Wolfowitz Doctrine" also envisioned the balkanization of Russia (the document
is still classified, but it leaked to a NYT journalist at the time, who published a report on
it).
It is not over in the sense that the West hasn't given up in its attempts to take over the
world. But as the "exceptionalist" western countries decline, they will go even crazier and
crazier and there will be full blown hysteria.
In this sense, the rule based order will be over as there will be only disorder and
animalistic, crazed western rage and bullying. The West is like a trapped animal. It will start pouncing, raging and snarling like a wild
animal. This is the real nature of the West. A hungry wild animal that needs to feed.
All the liberalism is just self-congratulation about how exceptionalist it is. It is born
out of narcisism and self-obsession during the "good times" of the West.
But behind the liberal mask, there are hateful eyes and gnashing teeth, and hunger and
greed for other people's resources.
The real face of it is hateful and snarling. And it will be fully exposed during the next
10 years, as the West goes crazy and it becomes a hungry wild animal that desperately needs
to feed.
Expressed in words, the West's face says "I'm the best and you are nothing! Give me your
stuff! And this is how it will forever be!"
Countries need to stay out from the wild animal and carry a big stick just in case, until
it succumbs from its internal hatreds and contradictions.
As Putin has said, the US is no longer agreement capable. As b. outlines. the US elites no
longer follow the rule of law. This is even true within the US. The US inherited the role
formerly played by the British Empire after WW2.
The national security apparatus of both the
US and the Soviet Union kept the Cold War going. Notice how soon after JFK was assassinated
Khrushchev was deposed. Gorbachev rightly stopped the Soviets superpower regime. As Dmitri Orlov points out - Empire hollowed out the Soviet Union and he sees it doing the same to the
US.
Instead of bringing Russia into the Western liberal democracies (with the threat of major
nuclear war now drastically reduced) the now Anglo-Zionist Empire just looted it. The life
expectancy of Russians fell 7 years in a decade until rescued by Putin.
It can now be seen
that the Nixon-Kissinger opening up to China was not to gain access to its large market
potential but to gain access to hundreds of millions of cheap, disciplined, and educated
workers. The elites starting in the 70s became greedier. Jet travel,electronic communication,
and computers allowed the outsourcing of manufacture.
The spread of air conditioning allowed
even the too hot south to be a location. First in the US as the factories began their march
through the non union southern states onto Mexico. Management from the north could now live
in air conditioned houses, drive air conditioned cars and work in air conditioned offices.
The 70s oil inflation led to stagnation as the unionized labor were powerful enough to get
cost of living raises. With the globalization of labor union power in the US has been
destroyed. As Eric X Li points out China's one party rule actually changes policies easier
than the Western democracies.
So China's government hasn't joined in with the West in just
creating wealth for the top 1% and debt for the real economy.
As b. pointed out, the Anglo
Zionist policies created the mutual benefit partnership of Russia and China. The Chinese belt
and road initiative appears to be intent on creating a large trading zone that could benefit
those involved. The US is just using sanctions and the military to turn sovereign functioning
countries that don't go along with it into failed states and their infrastructure turned to
rubble
Now, the US is forced into puppeteering the UN in order to maintain the illusion of the
'rules based order,' even as it slides further and further away from any meaningful
international cooperation:
Fortunately for the world, the United States took responsible action to stop this from
happening. In accordance with our rights under UNSCR 2231, we initiated the snapback process
to restore virtually all previously terminated UN sanctions, including the arms embargo. The
world will be safer as a result.
The United States expects all UN Member States to fully comply with their obligations
to implement these measures. In addition to the arms embargo, this includes restrictions
such as the ban on Iran engaging in enrichment and reprocessing-related activities, the
prohibition on ballistic missile testing and development by Iran, and sanctions on the
transfer of nuclear- and missile-related technologies to Iran, among others. If UN Member
States fail to fulfill their obligations to implement these sanctions, the United States is
prepared to use our domestic authorities to impose consequences for those failures and ensure
that Iran does not reap the benefits of UN-prohibited activity.
Actually the Trump Administration has done far more against Russia than all US
administrations from the last 30 years. Do not listen what they say, look at what they
do. Right now the US in a full blown Cold War with Russia with ever increasing attacks.
Pompeo talks more or less continually about "China's bullying behaviour". To me it is
wonderful that he can say this with a straight face. (Perhaps it is a result of his lessons
in the CIA on "how to lie better".)All the countries that have engaged with China have
benefitted from it, whether as salesmen or as recipients of aid or loans at advantageous
rates. The countries that have engaged with America have mostly (All?) lost. (The fifty+
countries invaded and wrecked since WW2 or the NATO "allies" or the countries attacked with
sanctions.) Either their economies were destroyed or billions upon billions of dollars were
paid to the US MIC. The NATO member countries have got what from their membership? Formerly,
they had "Protection" from an imaginary Soviet threat, more recently "Protection" from an
equally imaginary Russian threat! Some bargain, that!
Rules based international order .... the U.S. functions as the the Supreme Court for the
U.N. , 'we have invoked snapback sanctions and extended the arms embargo on Iran
indefinitely and are enforcing it'. UN, 'but your vote failed'.
U.S, 'we have the right to seize cargo between any two countries transported in
international waters based on U.S. federal appeals court decision even though the transaction
in no way involves the U.S. We call this Freedom of Navigation and why we need to have
aircraft carriers in the South China Sea and Arabian Gulf'
Rules based International Order is the dog whistle for global private finance controlled
economies.
It is sad that we are in a civilization war with China/Russia about who runs international
finance going forward and yet there is no discussion of the subject but instead all sorts of
proxy conflicts.
Thanks for the posting b as it gets to the core myths around the global private finance
jackboot on the neck of countries in the West.
The US is not just facing relative decline -- the fact that others are catching up in key
ways. The US is also facing absolute decline -- the fact that it is suffering a degradation
of capacities and is losing competitive battles in key areas. Examples of absolute decline
include the Russian and Chinese military-technological revolutions based on anti-ship and
hypersonic missiles and air defense systems; Chinese 5G; China's demonstrative success in
suppressing COVID and its overall manufacturing power; the declining quality of life for most
Americans; and the collapse of American institutional competence.
Related to this, we can't separate these dynamics from the political economy of the states
in question. China, in particular, is showing that an interventionist state, with high levels
of public ownership, is essential to qualitative power, human security, and economic and
social development.
Capitalism might enrich a few, but it is the primary cause of America's relative and
absolute decline.
US and allied military analysts have been talking over the last year or so of the need to
enter a single focus and total "wartime" posture throughout our societies, with all financial
and industrial output directed to the "war". This has influenced the information/ propaganda
efforts, but also the uptick in military manoeuvres around Taiwan and renewed NATO pressure
directed at Russia (including the recent provocative B52 flights). Don't think Russia/China
can be tricked into over-reacting, but some kind of loss-of-life military confrontation may
be what the rules-based side is looking for as the population at large will probably not
accept a "wartime sacrifice" regimen without such.
Whilst Russia and China are creating a truly new, unique and creative alliance and a
market of everything, in Australia the "authorities" are sicking their police dogs on poor
grannies sitting on park benches. This image of five brainless armed state goons in a show of
force over two quiet little grannies really puts things into perspective. It must be that New
World Order that Soros and puppets always talked about.
Psssst, learning Russian is easier than Chinese and we already know a few Russian words,
such as novichok.
The post scriptum stopped the clock for me. Has our host slipped into our drink there a
profound prophecy, disguised as jesting?
Many agree something big will happen (break?) soon, possibly with the elections. The other
thing is the Americans' ability to change course, drop all baggage, and run off in a new,
even the opposite direction with unfettered enthusiasm (and ferocity). No people has a
greater capacity for almost instant renewal, once it chooses to.
I also notice that the spoof takes good aim at The Donald's peculiarities, though in a
fair and human way. The proverbial Russian warmth, or a humorous invitation?
Meanwhile, I enjoy my newfound optimism in these dark times. Thanks b!
Thanks b and on Anatol Lieven in the Prospect story (fairy story?)...
Russia after the Cold War was a shambles and today it remains a weak economy with a limited
role on the world stage, concerned mainly with retaining some of its traditional areas of
influence. China is a vastly more formidable competitor. If the US (and the UK, if as usual
we tag along) approach the relationship with Beijing with anything like the combination of
arrogance, ignorance, greed, criminality, bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which
western elites managed the period after the Cold War, then we risk losing the
competition and endangering the world. [my emphasis]
Lieven simply does not see it. Has it ever occurred to Lieven that colonialism just might
be rejected by both Russia and China and that there might be no competition? Does Lieven
watch too much football?
What is it that endangers the world in Lieven's petite cortex? This verbose Lieven
tosh is littered with fancy sentences trawled from here and there but always presented to us
from a narrow dimensional mind with limited analysis and seemingly zero interrogation.
again:- "then we risk losing the competition and endangering the world"...
So Lieven thinks the current behaviour of the US hegemon and its collaborator the UK is
innocuous? These were the two nations that blithely squandered the "peace dividend" from the
end of cold war as he describes and have led us to this time of perpetual war. A perpetual
war that he does not mention, does not allude to, does not treat as an important driver
behind the current global mistrust and disengagement from the USUK drive for global
dominance.
Lieven is putting lipstick on his pig and screaming about losing the competition to the
imagined wolf outside his prison.
It is not over in the sense that the West hasn't given up in its attempts to take over
the world.
I agree. The contest between the Empire and the upstarts is not over by a long shot. What the West HAS lost is the "inevitability" argument. But for the upstarts to actually
prevail in their "multi-lateral" vision, they have to actually entice countries to join them
despite threats and intimidation from the Empire.
_________________________________
Passer by @Sep22 20:15 #14
Right now the US in a full blown Cold War with Russia with ever increasing attacks.
Yes. We still see the narratives like of Trump as Putin-lover despite the debunking of
Russiagate and the clear evidence of Cold War tensions. The incessant propaganda reeks of
desperation.
<> <> <> <> <> <>
Some seem to think that the Empire is cornered.
Aha! We've got you now, you scoundrels!
LOL.
The Empire's power-elite KNOW that Russia, China, and allies of Russia-China don't want to
be subject to their "rules-based order". The Empire is actively working to undermine,
subvert, and divide the countries that oppose it. While also securing their own
territories/population via intimidation and propaganda.
On rules based disorder and the capitulation of Merkel and her BND lapdogs to the 'hate
Russia' fulminations of the UKUSA morons. I see that the German Parliament has NOT TAKEN its
red pills these days and is reluctant to swallow the BS. It would be satisfying to see the
collective wisdom of the Parliament to exceed that of the BND. But then that is a low bar.
"For our part, we more than once described a balanced and mutually acceptable framework
for future agreements in this sphere during our contacts with the American negotiators. Aware
of the difficulties on the path forward in light of how widely different our approaches are,
we proposed extending the New START as it was originally signed.
"We do not want any unilateral advantages, but we will not make any unilateral concessions
either. A deal may be possible if the United States is ready to coordinate a new document on
the basis of the balance of interests, parity and without expecting Russia to make unilateral
concessions. But this will take time. We can have time to do this if the treaty is
extended."
As predicted, the Outlaw US Empire makes an offer it knows will be refused so it can then
blame Russia for being an unreliable negotiating partner--a trick we've all seen before.
I agree. The contest between the Empire and the upstarts is not over by a long shot.
What the West HAS lost is the "inevitability" argument. But for the upstarts to actually
prevail in their "multi-lateral" vision, they have to actually entice countries to join them
despite threats and intimidation from the Empire.
Yes, the big question remaining is to predict what will happen and when. This is what the
real deal is. And I'm sure they are working on that in the Intel agencies. It can certainly be predicted that the US and the EU will be significantly weaker in 2030
that today. Will this be enough is the question.
We now have some new information about US long term health as published by CBO. Very
interesting numbers.
They predict lower population growth and lower GDP growth for the US than previously
estimated, as well as higher debt rates. US federal debt is to reach 195 % of GDP by 2050 under best case scenario.
Analysts also seem to agree that the Covid 19 crisis further weakened the US vis a vis
China, as the Chinese economy significantly outperformed almost everyone else this year, more
than expected before the crisis.
I will also mention two important recent numbers. This year:
1. China, for the first time, became the biggest trading partner for the EU, beating the
US.
2. China's retail market overtook the one of the US.
Posted by: vk | Sep 22 2020 19:05 utc | 4 -- "....Eurasia is where most of human civilization
lives, it's the "World Island" - the world island not in the military sense, but in the
economic sense. Every path to human prosperity passes through Eurasia - that's why the USA
can't "let it alone" in the first place, while the reverse is not true, that is, Eurasia can
give to the luxury of letting the Americas alone."
Excellent observation, VK.
Even if the World Island (thanks for your formulation) trades with itself, within itself,
there is sufficient mass to last a century, during which the arrogantly exceptional West
might just wake up from their Century of Humiliation.
Meanwhile, inertia alone will ensure that the West forgets that their vaunted
"civilisation" was fed, watered, enriched by the Silk Route that came from the East -- from
the Middle Kingdom (China) and from the Middle East (which is "middle", as you pointed out
above, because all wealth passes through that region).
Yes there are rules which are observed more by their breach than their observance: The Geneva
Conventions. Just ask Julian Assange.
I find it incredible that the Anglo-Zionist captive nations can sign, ratify, incorporate
into domestic law and then sign the additional protocol, making themselves high contracting
parties, which requires them to report all and any breaches to Geneva, then ignore all the
above commitments. One of these commitments includes educating their citizens on the basic
provisions of the conventions. Again they haven't bothered, that could expose their hypocrisy
to the public.
Even the bandit statelet signed but I am yet to see just one example of its application in
the seventy plus years of its barbaric and bloodthirsty occupation of Palestine.
Interestingly, the conventions prohibit the occupied from signing away one iota of their
territory to the occupier. So much for what Claude Pictet's Commentary to the Fourth Geneva
Convention calls "alleged annexations." This book is available from the ICRC.
My late father as an army officer prosecuted Japanese war criminals for their atrocities
now the Anglo-Zionists are the pre-eminent war criminals and their leaders loudly proclaim
"our values" as a pathological and propagandistic form of projection. Is it possible they are
unaware of their blatant hypocrisy ?
It seems the New World Order has some familiar and unsurprising antecedents:
Anatol Lieven comes from an educated and cultured family in Britain's upper middle class
layer. His older siblings - he is the youngest of five children - include a High Court judge
(Dame Natalie Lieven), a Cambridge University professor / historian (Dominic Lieven) and a
psychologist / linguistics researcher (Elena Lieven). They haven't done badly for a family from the old Baltic German
aristocratic elite that used to serve the Russian empire as administrators for the
Livonia governorate.
The British Lievens might see themselves as gatekeepers and interpreters of what the
ruling classes desire (or appear to desire) and communicate that down to us. Hence their
positions in intellectual and academic occupations - no engineers, technicians or academics
in the physical or biological sciences among their number.
Anatol Lieven is right though about "competition", in the sense I believe he is using it:
it is "competition" for supposed global leadership and influence as only the British and
Americans understand it. Life as British and American elites understand it is the annual
football competition writ large; there can only be one winner and the worst position to be in
is second place and every other place below it. Never mind that what Russia and China have in
mind is a vision of the world with multiple and overlapping leadership roles dispersed among
nations according to various criteria: this ideal is simply too much for the Anglosphere
elites to understand, let alone digest and accept.
Still, I wonder why Anatol Lieven is teaching in a university in Qatar of all places.
Family influence and reputation must only go so far.
if you aren't at least a little prepared for a
disruption in critical supplies, and choose instead to waste time commenting on online
forums, it won't matter how up to date you are on "rules based international order" vs.
"international law". at that point the reality will be something like this: if you aren't
holding it, you don't have it, and if you can't defend it, you won't be keeping it for long.
Got that absolutely right.
There is no "international law" and no "international order." There is only relative
power. And when those powers clash, as seems inevitable, the world is in for a major nuclear
war, and probably preceded by several more regional wars. Meanwhile, the US internally is
collapsing into economic disaster, social unrest, political and social oppression,
infrastructure failure, and medical disasters. We'll probably be in martial law sometime
between November 3 and January 21 if not beyond that period, just for starters.
This month is National Preparedness Month. I recommend watching the following videos from
well-known "preppers" who have been warning about this stuff for years.
And this one from The Urban Prepper, an IT guy who is exceptionally well organized and
logical in his videos. I recommend subscribing to his channel. He avoids most of the
excessive "doom and gloom" hype that afflicts a lot of prepper channels and is oriented more
about urban survival than "backwoods bushcraft" since most people live in cities. Prepping 101: Prepping
Architecture Diagram for Gear Organization
And if you don't watch anything else, watch this one from Canadian Prepper - he's
absolutely right in this one and it specifically applies to the barflies here: What is Really Going
On? Its WORSE Than You Think
Meanwhile, inertia alone will ensure that the West forgets that their vaunted "civilisation"
was fed, watered, enriched by the Silk Route that came from the East -- from the Middle
Kingdom (China) and from the Middle East (which is "middle", as you pointed out above,
because all wealth passes through that region).
Posted by: kiwiklown | Sep 22 2020 23:41 utc | 39
Oh, and this one from Canadian Prepper in which he muses about whether and why we actually
*want* the SHTF situation to occur. This one would resonate with a lot of the commentary here
about the social malaise and the psychological reasons for it. Maybe nothing really new for
some, but definitely relevant.
Still, I wonder why Anatol Lieven is teaching in a university in Qatar of all places.
Family influence and reputation must only go so far.
Thank you that backgrounder explains a lot. Perhaps like Englanders before him he finds
Qatar, safe and rewarding PLUS mounds of finest hashish and titillating company. From my
understanding it is a grotesque abuser of human rights and everyone has a price.
America's "Rules-Based International Order" is a Goebbelsian euphemism for a Lies-Based
Imperial Order, led by the USA and its war criminal allies (aka the self-styled Free World).
The true nature of this America-led order is exposed by the USA's war of aggression
against Iraq (which violated international law and had no United Nations sanction) and its
decades-long War on Terrorism, which have murdered hundreds of thousands of people and
maimed, immiserated, or refugeed millions of more people. These crimes against humanity have
been justified by Orwellian American lies about "Weapons of Mass Destruction," "fighting
terrorism," or the curious events of Sept. 11th.
This America "Rules-Based" order is one drenched in the blood of millions of people--even
as it sanctimoniously disguises itself behind endless propaganda about defending liberal
democracy or the rule of law.
Truly, America and its allies can take their malignant Rules-Based Disorder back to Hell,
where they all belong.
"Thus your "side note" has no "relevance" whatsoever."
You sound like some podunk UN official from a podunk country trying to impress a waitress
in a NYC bar. The Empire is very much alive and dangerous. Ask Iran, ask Syria, as the
Palestinians, ask the Russians, ask the Chinese. Ask numerous African nations. Even Pangloss
was not so stupidly naive.
Thank you - YES that is the answer and always has been PLUS there will be no pipeline from
Iran through Afghanistan to Pakistan and on to China. There will be NO overland pipeline or
rail route to sound the death knell to the maritime mafia.
Please vote for trump 2020. no president destroy America from inside like what trump did. The goal is to accelerate American empire destruction and grip in this world.
What better way to put such clown along his circus in white house. he will make a mess of everything and will definitely bring
America down
i hope he win 2020 and America explode into civil war and chaos. With America destroyed internally , they wont have time to invade
Venezuela or Iran
Remember , if Biden win 2020 , American foreign policy will revert into normalcy that means
seeking alliance with EU and 5 eyes in a more meaningful way , aka giving them preferential
treatment on trade..
all that to box in china and russia , reenable TPP , initiate the delayed venezuela overt
invasion other than covert
this is dangerous for the whole world , not that it will save US in the long run but it
will increase real shooting conflict with china and russia.. So focus on trump victory in 2020 , the more controversial the win the better , lets push america into chaos
I appreciate the time and thought that goes into a post like this; all without a popup ad
trying to sell me ANOTHER item I just bought via Amazon, in spite of the fact that I am among
the least likely to want another right now. Voice of reason crying in the wilderness and all
that.
The rule The Capitalist Ogres promote as the heart of Civilization is simply the age-old
Golden Rule. Those with the gold, make the rules.
@ptb quite right.
'Rules based order' was always a euphemism for exceptionalism of one kind or another. ie US and its "allies" is basically asking the rest of the world to finance their (the US
et al)
version of a welfare state.
as US et al can no longer fund their own unaffordable welfare promises made to their own
electorates, they have to call on the rest of the world to do so (China has been effectively
funding the US budget deficit since they entered the WTO.
and the EU (mainly Germany) was doing the same before China's entry into WTO)
China and rest of the worlds foreign central banks stopped growing their foreign exchange
reserves (on net) in 2014
leaving the US in a sort of limbo.
Well, you're sorta correct; it was all those nations including China that bought Outlaw US
Empire debt. China certainly knows better now and for almost a decade now it's purchases--and
those of the rest of the world -- of said debt have declined to the point where a huge crisis
related to the debt pyramid threatens all those aside from the 1% living within the Outlaw US
Empire. The Judo involved was very instructive.
"Trump's UN
address censured" headlines Global Times article that reviews yesterday's UNGA.
Domestic BigLie Media didn't like what it heard from Trump:
"Commenting on the US' performance, many Western media tended to view US as being
'isolated,' and its unilateral efforts 'widely derided....'
"Some US media outlets cannot stand Trump's accusations. A WSJ report said many Democrats
blamed Trump for "isolating the US and diluting American influence in the WHO or other
bodies."
It went on to say Trump's threat of withdrawal is often used as leverage to "influence
partner countries, or get allies to pay more for shared defense."
"Some US media linked Trump's address to his widely blamed effort to re-impose sanctions
on Iran, saying his address came as 'UN members push back against Washington,' AP
reported.
"Wednesday's Washington Post article reported that the Trump administration walked on a
'lonely path' at the UN where the US attacked WHO, and embarked on the 'widely derided'
effort to snap back Iran sanctions.
"A week before the UN General Assembly, US media NPR predicted that the US 'appeared to be
isolated' at this year's General Assembly, saying that Trump's 'America First' agenda left
him out of sync with America's traditional allies as it has a long record of pulling out of
international agreements, including one meant to tackle the world's climate crisis."
So, Trump's attack on China's environmental record was beyond hypocritical and ought to be
termed psychopathic prevarication. The best comment from the article well describes the
Trumptroll @53:
"'Trump's smears and attacks against China were apparently aimed at campaigning for his
reelection. Only his die-hard fans - those who do not care about truth but support him -
will buy his words ,' Ding Yifan, a researcher at the Institute of World Development of
the Development Research Center of the State Council, told the Global Times." [My
Emphasis]
And isn't that really the basic issue--the truth? 75 years of lies by the Outlaw US Empire
to cover it's continuous illegalities and subversion of its own fundamental law while killing
and displacing tens of millions of people. Guardian of the Free World my ass! More like
Guardian of the Gates of Hell.
Yes, I'm biased, but anyone seeking truth and invoking the Rule of Law would find themselves
at odds with the Outlaw US Empire. Today's Global Times Editorial makes
the following key observations:
"Major powers maintaining cooperation, at least not engaging in Cold War-style antagonism,
is the important foundation of world peace. China is committed to maintaining cooperation
among major powers, as well as being flexible in the balance of interests acceptable to all
parties. The problem is the Trump administration is hysterically shaping decoupling and
confrontation between Beijing and Washington, and has been mobilizing more forces to its side
at home and abroad. Those US policymakers are deliberately splitting the world like during
the Cold War.
"The impulse to promote a cold war is the ultimate version of unilateralism, and shows
dangerous and mistaken arrogance that the US is almighty. Everyone knows that the US is
declining in its competitiveness under the rules-based international system the US itself
initiated and created. It wants to build a new system more beneficial to itself, and allow
the US to maintain its advantage without making any effort. This is simply impossible."
My research is pointing me to conclude the First Cold War was contrived so the Outlaw US
Empire could impose privately owned finance and corporations and the political-economies
connected to them upon the world lest the collective forces that were the ones to actually
defeat Fascism gain control of their national governments and shape their political-economies
into the public/collectively owned realm where the benefits would flow to all people instead
of just the already powerful. That's also the intent of imposing a Second Cold War. Some seem
to think there's no ideological divide at play, but as I've ceaselessly explained there most
certainly is, thus the intense demonization of both Russia and China--the Strategic
Competition also is occurring in the realm of Ideas. And the only tools available for the
Outlaw US Empire to use are lies, since the truths involved would encourage any neutral
nation to join the Win-Win vision of China and Russia, not the Zero-sum bankruptcy pushed by
the Parasites controlling the Empire.
@ karlof1 | Sep 23 2020 15:56 utc | 84 and forward with the links and quotes...thanks
I do like the confirmation Pepe quote, thanks
It is sad to understand that much of the US population does not have the mental clarity to
see that Trump is no different than Biden when it comes to fealty to the God of Mammon. Way
too many Americans think that replacing Trump with Biden will make things all better.
The end of the rules based international order/global private finance cannot end soon
enough, IMO
Thanks for your reply! As I discussed with the Missus last night, IMO only the people
regaining control over the federal government can rescue themselves from the multiple
dilemmas they face--the most pressing being the Debt Bomb and control of the monetary and
fiscal systems by private entities as exemplified by the Federal Reserve and Wall Street,
both of which employ the Financial Parasites preying on the nation's body-politic. Undoing
all the past wrongs requires both Congress and the Executive be captured by The People who
can then write the laws to end the wrongs while arresting and prosecuting those responsible
for the last 20+ years of massive fraud. The biggest components would be ending the Federal
Reserve, Nationalizing all the fraudster banks, writing down the vast majority of debt, and
disbanding NATO thus ending the overseas empire. Those are the most fundamental steps
required for the USA to avoid the coming calamity brought about by the Neoliberals. I also
have finally developed my thesis on where, why and how that philosophy was developed and put
into motion.
The first 'Cold War' was entirely contrived. The US knew the Soviet Union was weak and had
no agenda beyond maintaining security and its own reconstruction after WW2. There was no
threat of a Western European invasion, or of the USSR spreading revolution globally. All that
Cold War ideology is a lie. And the same lying is taking place about China today. No
difference.
The key issues for the US were:
1. it needed western european capitalist states to buy US manufactured exports. Those
states had to remain capitalist and subordinate to the US, i.e. to avoid what Acheson called
'neutralism' in world politics.
2. the US wanted gradual decolonization of the British and French empires so that US firms
could access markets and resources in those same territories. but the US feared revolutionary
nationalism in the colonies and the potential loss of market access by the former colonial
powers, which would need resources from the post-colonial world to rebuild after WW2.
The key event which cemented the 'Cold War' in Europe was the division of Germany, which
Carolyn Eisenberg shows was entirely an American decision, in her important book, Drawing the
Line.
The driving force of all this, though, was the economic imperatives of US capitalism. The
US needed to restore and save capitalism in Western Europe and Japan, and the Cold War was
the ideological framework for doing so. The Cold War ideology also allowed the US to frame
its meddling in Korea, Guatemala, Iran, etc.
The late historian Gabriel Kolko wrote the best analyses of these issues. His work is much
better than the New Left 'revisionist' US historians.
I agree with your recap and second your appraisal of Gabriel Kolko. Eisenberg's work
somehow escaped my view but will no longer thanks to your suggestion.
But I see more to it all as the First Cold War had to occur to promote the
financialization of the USA's industrial Capitalism which began within the USA in 1913 and
was abruptly interrupted by the various market crashes, the failure of the international
payments system and subsequent massive deflation and Great Depression. A similar plan to
outsource manufactures to its colonies and commonwealth and financialize its economy was
began in the UK sometime after the end of the US Civil War. At the time in England, the
school of Classical Political-Economists and their political allies (CPE) were attempting to
rid the UK and the rest of Europe of the last vestiges of Feudalism that resided in the
Rentier and Banking Classes, the former being mostly populated by Royalty and its
retainers. Land Rent was the primary source of their income while it was the stated intent of
the CPE to change the tax burden from individuals and businesses to that of Land Rent and
other forms of Unearned Income. That movement came swiftly on the heels of the abolition of
the Slave Trade which was a vast source of Royal income. Recognizing this threat to the basis
of their wellbeing, the Royals needed to turn the tables but in such a manner where their
manipulation was secret because of the vast popularity of the CPE's agenda. Thus began the
movement to discredit the CPE and remove their ideas from discourse and later completely from
the history of political-economy. And there was another problem--German Banks and their
philosophy inspired by Bismarck to be totally supportive of German industry, which provided
the impetus for its own colonial pursuits primarily in Africa.
Within that paragraph is my thesis for the rise of Neoliberalism, much of which Dr. Hudson
documents but hasn't yet gotten to/revealed the root cause of the counter revolution against
the CPE. IMO, that reactionary movement underlies far more, particularly the growing
animosity between the UK and Germany from 1875 to 1914. As Eisenberg's research proves,
there's much more past to be revealed that helps to resolve how we arrived at the times we
now face.
Indeed, as Hudson and Max Keiser ask: Why pay taxes at all since the Fed can create all
the credit required. I've written about the pros and cons of Secession here before which are
quite similar to those existing in 1861. In Washington for example, how to deal with all the
Federal property located there. Just as Ft. Sumter didn't belong to South Carolina, the many
military bases there don't belong to Washington. Trying to seize it as the South Carolinians
attempted in 1861 merely creates the casus belli sought by Trump. Now if you could get the
vast majority of the military stationed in Washington to support your cause, your odds of
resisting would greatly improve.
IMO, trying to regain public control over the Federal government would be much easier.
Thank you brother karlof1, YES, the minotaur indeed but where is Theseus and Ariadne when
we need them? Please don't tell me that Biden and Harris are the 'chosen ones' - that would mock the
legend and prove that the gods are truly crazy :))
It seems to me that a review is required, that we need to turn back the clock to an earlier
analysis whose veracity has only been boosted by subsequent events. So here from
2011: "On November 3, 2011, Alan Minsky interviewed me on KPFK's program, 'Building a
Powerful Movement in the United States' in preparation for an Occupy L.A. teach-in." Here's a
brief excerpt to remind people what this is all about:
"Once people realize that they're being screwed, that's a pre-revolutionary situation.
It's a situation where they can get a lot of sympathy and support, precisely by not doing
what The New York Times and the other papers say they should do: come up with some neat
solutions. They don't have to propose a solution because right now there isn't one –
without changing the system with many, many changes. So many that it's like a new
Constitution. Politics as well as the economy need to be restructured. What's developing now
is how to think about the economic and political problems that are bothering people. It is
not radical to realize that the economy isn't working. That is the first stage to realizing
that a real alternative is needed. We've been under a radical right-wing attack – and
need to respond in kind. The next half-year probably will be spent trying to spell out what
the best structure would be."
It's good to see discussion here of the nefarious role of the American far-right neocon
warmongers in the State Department, intelligence services and military leadership just before
the turn of the new century. What I have never seen clearly explained, however, is the
connection between these very dangerous forces and the equally cynical and reactionary
Israeli politicians and the Mossad, as well as Saudi Arabian officials.
Like many others, I
have been slowly won over to the position that the attacks of 9-11, and especially the
totally unprecedented collapses of the three WTC towers, could only have been caused by the
precisely timed explosion of previously installed demolition materials containing nanothermite. But if one accepts that position the immediately subsequent question is "Who
planned and carried out the attacks?" Many people have claimed it was the Mossad, others that
it was the Mossad in concert with the US neocons etc., -- many of whom were Israeli/US dual
citizens -- but even now, so many years after the horrific events, I can find no coherent
account of how such conspirators, or any others for that matter, might actually have carried
out WTC building demotions. Do any of you know of sources on the matter that have made good
progress on connecting the dots and explaining what precisely happened -- the easier part --
and how exactly it was carried out, by whom, and how they have managed to get away with it
for all this time?
Lieven: If the US (and the UK, if as usual we tag along) approach the relationship with
Beijing with anything like the combination of arrogance, ignorance, greed, criminality,
bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which western elites managed the period after the
Cold War, then we risk losing the competition and endangering the world.[my emphasis]
Uncle Tungsten: Lieven simply does not see it. Has it ever occurred to Lieven that
colonialism just might be rejected by both Russia and China and that there might be no
competition? Does Lieven watch too much football?
What is it that endangers the world in Lieven's petite cortex?
-------
It is clear to me that Tungsten does not understand Lieven because Lieven does not cross all
t's and dot all i's. There can be two reasons for Lieven style: (1) a British style, leaving
some conclusions to the reader, it is not elegant to belabor the obvious (2) Lieven works in
a pro-Western feudal state and that particular piece appeared in a neo-liberal outfit where
it is already a clear outlier toward (what I see as) common sense. Neo-liberals view
themselves as liberals, "tolerating a wide spectrum of opinion", but with clear limits about
the frequency and content for the outliers of their tolerance.
Back to "endangering the world", how "loosing competition to China" can result in huge
mayhem? I guess that Tungsten is a little dense here. The sunset of Anglo-Saxon domination
can seem like the end of the world for the "members" of that domination. But a longer
historical perspective can offer a much darker vision of the future. First, there is a clash
of two blocks, one with superior industrial production, domination of markets of assorted
goods -- both as importer and exporter, etc, the other with still superior military
technology and combative spirit.
Recall (or check) the situation in east Asia ca. 1240 AD. One of the major power was Song
China, after a calamitous defeat roughly 300 years later, diminished Song China succeeded in
developing all kinds of practical and beautiful goods and vibrant commerce while having quite
inept military. The second major power was the Mongols. You can look up the rest.
USA stresses the military types of pressures, and seeing its position slipping too far,
they may resort to a series of gigantic "provocations" -- from confiscation of property by
fiat, like they did to Venezuela, to piracy on open seas, no cargoes can move without their
approval and tribute, from there things can escalate toward nuclear war.
More generally, western decline leads to decrease of wealth affecting the lower classes
first but gradually reaching higher, enmity toward competitors, then hatred, such processes
can have dire consequences.
Importantly, these are speculations, so stopping short of spelling them out is reasonable.
However, give some credit to Lieven for "the combination of arrogance, ignorance, greed,
criminality, bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which western elites managed the period
after the Cold War".
On the rule-based world order. Scattered thoughts.
The article by Lieven was good in one aspect: it at least mentioned the crazy economic
template aka imho 'religion' that lead to a part of this mess. For the rest, hmm. The 'rules based international order' was always pretty much a phoney scaffold, used for
presentation to hide, cover up, legitimised many goings on (after WW2 I mean.)
Like a power-point extolling xyz product, with invented or 'massaged' charts and all.,
with tick boxes for what it positive or followed. (Fairness, Democracy, etc. etc. as
'Natural' 'Organic' etc. Total BS.)
In these kinds of discussions I am always reminded of the 'rights of the child' which in
CH are taught in grade 3-5, with a boiled down text, logo type pix, etc. It is very tough on
teachers, and they often only pretend to push the content. There are many immigrant children
in CH and the natives know that the 'rights' are not respected and not just in 'jungles'
(anarchist / animalistic hot spots) as they say. The kids go nuts - as they still more or
less believe that they 'have a voice' as it called -- the parents follow the kids, lotsa
troubles. OK, these are aspirations - but 'democracy' (purposely used as a calling card
following advice from a well-know ad agency..) is so as well. And presenting aspirations that
can't possibly be achieved in any way, when not a smiley joke about meeting God or flying to
Mars, and is socially important, is not well received.
Anyway, since the invasion of Iraq (totally illegal according to any standards) leading to
the biggest demos in the world ever, a loud indignant cry, which invasion the UN condoned,
ppl (in my experience, in CH, F, It) no longer have a shred of belief in 'international
rules'. Which of course makes them more 'nationalist' in the sense of acting in the
community, close at hand, as the Intl order is a shit-scene.
Tucker: This parading of Ginsburg death wish "is ridiculous and insulting"
Two neoliberal faction of the US elite ("hard neolibs" and "soft neolibs") struggle for power
really entered a new phase. BTW control of Supreme Court was always a part of struggle for power.
And this "royal wish" think is just one episode of this entertaining
fight. Great spectacle, but friends will unite when the time comes to approve the military
budget.
Why are people so upset about this "final wish" thing? Like it just seems convenient to me
and made up; and even if wasn't made up, who gives her the right to dictate how the
constitution works. It's obvious the Dems are using this to try and keep the GOP from getting
an extra seat on the Supreme Court, and I don't really blame them, GOP would have probably
done the same thing, they're both hypocrites.
The fact that large part of population consider Democratic leadership criminal and anther
part Trump administration criminal is a new factor in 2020 elections. Look like neoliberal Dems
made another blunder in unleashing American Maidan in those circumstances.
Thanks to Judge Emmet Sullivan refusing the DOJ's request to drop the Michael Flynn case, a
cache of explosive documents has now been released to the public revealing that at least one
FBI agent on Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team thought the case was a politically motivated
"dead end," and others bought professional liability insurance as their bosses were continuing
the investigation based on " conspiracy theories. "
In one case, FBI agent William J. Barnett said
during a Sept. 17 interview that he believed Mueller's prosecution of Flynn was part of an
attitude to "get Trump," and that he didn't want to pursue the Trump-Russia collusion
investigation because it was "not there" and a "dead end," according to
Fox News .
Barnett, during his interview, detailed his work at the FBI, and his assignment to the
bureau's original cases against Flynn and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Barnett said the Flynn investigation was assigned the code name "Crossfire Razor," which was
part of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation -- the bureau's code name for the original
Trump-Russia probe.
Barnett told investigators that he thought the FBI's Trump-Russia probe was "opaque" and
"with little detail concerning specific evidence of criminal events."
" Barnett thought the case theory was 'supposition on supposition,'" the 302 stated, and
added that the "predication" of the Flynn investigation was "not great, " and that it "was
not clear" what the "persons opening the case wanted to 'look for or at.'"
After six weeks of investigating, Barnett said he was "still unsure of the basis of the
investigation concerning Russia and the Trump campaign working together , without a specific
criminal allegation." -
Fox News
When Barnett approached agents about what they thought the 'end game' was with Flynn -
suggesting they interview the former National Security Adviser "and the case be closed unless
derogatory information was obtained," he was cautioned not to conduct an interview, as it may
tip Flynn off that he was under investigation.
"Barnett still did not see any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the
Russian government," the 302 states. "Barnett was willing to follow any instructions being
given by the deputy director as long as it was not a violation of the law."
Insurance over "conspiracy theories"?
Another revelation from documents in the Flynn case comes in the form of text messages
released on Thursday in which agents bought liability insurance, fearing they would be sued
over an investigation into Flynn based on "conspiracy theories."
"We all went and purchased professional liability insurance," one analyst texted on Jan. 10,
2017 - 10 days before Trump was inaugurated, according to
Just The News .
"Holy crap," responded a colleague. "All of the analysts too?"
"Yep," replied the first analyst. "All the folks at the Agency as well."
"Can I ask who are the most likely litigators?" responded a colleague. "As far as
potentially suing y'all."
"Haha, who knows .I think the concern when we got it was that there was a big leak at DOJ
and the NYT among others was going to do a piece," the first analyst texted back.
NEVER
MISS THE NEWS THAT MATTERS MOST
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The explosive messages were attached to a new filing by Flynn's attorney Sidney Powell,
who argued to the court that is considering dismissing her client's guilty plea that the
emails show "stunning government misconduct" and "wrongful prosecution."
A hearing is scheduled for next Tuesday.
" There was no case against General Flynn ," Powell wrote in the new motion. " There was
no crime. The FBI and the prosecutors knew that. This American hero and his entire family
have suffered for four years from public abuse, slander, libel, and all means of defamation
at the hands of the very government he pledged his life to defend." -
Just The News
Thanks to Judge Sullivan's hatred of Flynn, the world now knows how much more corrupt the
Mueller investigation was.
ay_arrow
novictim , 1 minute ago
"We all went and purchased professional liability insurance," one analyst texted on
Jan. 10, 2017 - 10 days before Trump was inaugurated, according to
Just The News .
Ok.
BUT NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THESE PROTECTORS OF THE CONSTITUTION BLEW THE WHISTLE.
None of these FBI agents seeing egregious abuse of power by the FBI leveled at a
decorated Lt. Gen. had the moral fortitude to stand up and say "NO!". They all hated Trump
so much that they simply bought protection insurance for themselves.
FIRE ALL OF THEM.
play_arrow
J J Pettigrew , 2 minutes ago
A soft coup attempt...
does this qualify as "swaying an election"? Like the 2018 election that gave the House
to the Dems and Pelosi her power?
Or is this an attempt to flip an election from 2016?
They always accuse others of that which they themselves are guilty...ALWAYS. At least
they let us know what they are up to. Like who is in bed with Russian oligarchs.....Hunter
gets the 3.5 million
play_arrow
Everybodys All American , 6 minutes ago
Judge Sullivan has no choice. If he does not drop this case now then he is in serious
violation of the law in a big time way. Anything is possible from this idiot but he will be
impeached and removed if he does not dismiss this case for sure now.
lay_arrow
whackedinflorida , 8 minutes ago
It has been fairly obvious that if Sullivan refused to dismiss the case and insists on
having a hearing, a large amount of government misconduct would ultimately be disclosed.
Leftists are willing to believe anything if it fits their narrative, and ignore second
order effects of what they do. By the end of this, the charges against Flynn will be
dismissed (or he will be pardoned), and the prosecutors will be the ones facing the justice
system. Its almost as if Sullivan is doing Trump's bidding.
Show More Replies
otschelnik , 10 minutes ago
To start going up the food chain as to how this ****show got started we need to know a
couple of pieces of information which the deep state is jealously hiding from us:
1) WHO WERE THE CONTRACTORS ACCESSING THE NSA DATABASE? This will draw a straight line
back to the Democrat party.
2) WHO WERE THE FBI AGENTS TAKING LIABILITY INSURANCE? These are the same as USSR NKVD
henchmen shooting kulaks and political prisoners in the back of the head.
ay_arrow
Fabelhaft , 8 minutes ago
Flynn's courage reduces Mueller's battlefield manner to the shell-shocked infirmaries of
WW1.
lay_arrow 1
Aubiekong , 16 minutes ago
If we lived in a country of law and order. The democratic leadership would all be in
prison along with all those involved in the "investigation".
gaaasp , 32 minutes ago
When can Flynn speak freely?
turbojarhead , 26 minutes ago
I think you nailed it-Flynn cannot interview due to his legal case-the man who knows
where ALL the bodies are buried, SPECIFICALLY in the Iran deal. It ALMOST seems like
Sullivan-maybe at the behest of others-has been desperate to keep Flynn from being able to
speak up for 4 years...
Maxter , 1 minute ago
It doesn't make much sense that Flynn knows where all the bodies are buried but never
told the Trump team before all this mess.
The dossier compiled by British spy Christopher Steele, paid through the firm Fusion GPS by
Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, was used by the FBI to obtain a warrant to spy on
Trump campaign aide Carter Page in October 2016, prior to the presidential election. The
warrant was renewed after Donald Trump got elected president and finally expired sometime in
late 2017.
In a redacted,
two-page memo made public on Thursday by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), the US
Department of Justice reveals that Steele's "primary sub-source" (PSS) had been under
FBI investigation in 2009 as a possible Russian agent. The FBI team going after Trump
("Crossfire Hurricane") became aware of this in December 2016 and interviewed the PSS in
January 2017 – then renewed the Page FISA warrant three more times anyway.
"In December 2016, the CROSSFIRE HURRICANE team identified the Primary Sub-source used by
Christopher Steele and, at that time, became familiar with the 2009 investigation. The
CROSSFIRE HURRICANE team interviewed the Primary Sub-source over the course of three sequential
days in January 2017. At that time, the 2009 investigation remained closed. The 2009
investigation remains closed to this day," says the DOJ memo.
The reason the FBI had closed the investigation, as the memo reveals, was that the PSS had
left the US in September 2010. The FBI said "consideration would be given to re-opening the
investigation in the event" the person returned to the US. For whatever reason, though the
PSS did return at some point, the investigation was never reopened.
While the DOJ memo does not name the PSS, some enterprising internet sleuths fingered him in
July as one Igor Danchenko. His attorney Mark E. Schamel confirmed the identification to the
New York
Times a day after RT reported on it. Danchenko had worked as a researcher for the Brookings
Institution until 2010. This lines up with the memo saying he was working at a think tank in
Washington, DC when some coworkers suspected him of being a "Russian spy."
The FBI's investigation came up with nothing much beyond a September 2006 "contact with a
known Russian intelligence officer," and him being "very familiar" with a
"Washington, DC–based Russian officer."
Flimsy as that seems now, it was a lot more than they ever had on Carter Page. It didn't
help that FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith had altered evidence to make Page look like a foreign
agent, when he in fact was not. In August, Clinesmith pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of
making a false statement.
When he sent over the memo to Graham, Attorney General Bill Barr wrote that additional
classified information that "bears upon the FBI's knowledge concerning the reliability" of the
Steele dossier may be declassified by the Director of National Intelligence soon, as it won't
interfere with the criminal investigation conducted by US Attorney John Durham.
The Steele Dossier has been the keystone of 'Russiagate' – the manufactured scandal
accusing Trump of having ties or "colluding" with Russia during the 2016 election – from
the very beginning. It had already emerged that the "Crossfire Hurricane" team had interviewed
Danchenko in January 2017 and established that the Dossier was fabricated, but proceeded to use
it to spy on Trump, framing Carter Page as a Russian agent anyway. At the time, they
already knew that Danchenko had been under FBI investigation as a suspected Russian agent
– but it didn't seem to bother them in the least.
Simply put, this means Crossfire Hurricane team members – such as former agent
Peter Strzok and his paramour Lisa Page, as well as FBI director James Comey and his deputy
deputy Andrew McCabe, ought to have some explaining to do.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
S
o first neoliberal plunder the
country dry and then they offer hope of "Eurointergation" as a carrot and organize a color revolution to overthouth the government.
Is not this brilliant?
A
nd as people want ot live "as in
Europe" (often without understanding realities and seeing only tourist facade of the countries) this desire can become a door opener
of the color revolution.
Another factor is that neoliberalism lifts the standard of living of top 10% or 5 % of the population and create powerful fifth
column of compradors oriented on the West (a part of programmers and IT workers, large part of other well-paid professionals (such
as corporate lawyers, medical professionals, etc), naive or crooked students, employees of joint ventures, etc) who can be relied on
during the protest. Social network also simplify organization of frustrated underachievers and net hamsters for the protests.
Notable quotes:
"... From Ukraine's Euromaidan in 2014, we know that hope can be rather deceptive and elusive. It hovers within touching distance during protests and is an additional incentive, but it never becomes a reality. Disillusionment and frustration do not set in until it is already too late, by which time power has fallen into the hands of those who immediately tighten the screws and have no intention of discussing anything with the people. ..."
Colour revolutions and other forms of outside interference in state affairs are changing. This is both logical and natural, since
government bodies adapt to change, find ways to counter threats, and retain the right to use legitimate force, which, according
to Max Weber, is one of the features of the modern state. But no sooner do the world's leading centres for interference and
destabilisation start feeling for new vulnerabilities in state systems than there is yet another attempted coup or an attack on a
state system. This kind of instability is not desirable for any country, since it could gradually weaken the immunity of
sovereignty. As a consequence, the transformation of protest movements should be of particular interest since, by understanding
their development, it will be possible to predict protesters' and rioters' course of action. The protests in Belarus show that
this is not what happened there, and the authorities were forced to respond quickly to the situation.
For an adequate understanding of anti-government strategies, it is necessary to turn, first of all, to the methods used by those
organising the protests and coups.
In his article "
Protests
and Principles
", Srđa Popović, a well-known activist, organiser of colour revolutions and executive director of CANVAS,
writes that the ideological and geopolitical factors focussed on by the media are insufficient to fully understand what's going
on and evaluate the protests. He suggests paying attention to the structural conditions that differ in different countries, as
well as the outcomes of movements. Popović concludes that the protests in recent years have shown a certain trend – "the
traditional and institutional ways of creating change – elections, legal systems and dialogue with the elites – are
insufficiently effective. So protesters have decided to utilize another form of power to force constructive change."
Executive
director of CANVAS Srđa Popović
Further on, he asks: "If geography and ideology don't determine success, what does?" He outlines four key principles. One – a
clear vision of the future. Two – a united opposition that should have a good understanding of who its allies are and who is
neutral. Three – key pillars, which could be the media, business sectors, social institutions and government agencies
(particularly security agencies that could be enticed over to the opposition). Four – attraction, which is a common element in
many protest movements, since they position themselves as fighters of injustice.
At the same time, Popović admits that anger (and therefore also violence) is an effective tool for mobilisation, but it should be
combined with hope, otherwise it will play a destructive role.
It
is with a regretful sigh that Popović writes about the failed "revolutions" in Hong Kong and Venezuela, for which he partially
blames the opposition. The problem with the former was the violence used against the police, and with the latter it was that Juan
Guaidó put all his efforts into winning over the military and overthrowing Maduro with a coup.
In summary, Srđa Popović argues that initial conditions and context matter, but strategic skills matter even more. And it is
difficult to disagree. After all, an initial flash of protest can be suppressed, activist cells can be liquidated, and crowds can
be dispersed. And if there is no definite plan of action for how to act in a given situation, then any protest, whether peaceful
or violent, will come to nothing.
Needless to say, the information in Popović's article is for naive readers and written with the utmost care so as to rule out any
possible accusations of anti-state activities. All the advice is given from the standpoint of protecting democratic values.
Therefore, one needs to be able to read between the lines and draw conclusions from past coups.
From Ukraine's Euromaidan in 2014, we know that hope can be rather deceptive and elusive. It hovers within touching distance
during protests and is an additional incentive, but it never becomes a reality. Disillusionment and frustration do not set in
until it is already too late, by which time power has fallen into the hands of those who immediately tighten the screws and have
no intention of discussing anything with the people.
CANVAS, however, is an organisation that develops strategic action plans for particular countries. Judging by its
recent
online summer academy
, CANVAS was actively involved in the overthrow of Bolivian President Evo Morales, supported protests in
Sudan, Zimbabwe and Brazil, and has close ties with opposition groups in Malaysia, the Philippines and Georgia.
Peter
Ackerman
Popović's views on the strategic planning of coups is shared by
Peter
Ackerman
, former chair of the board of trustees of Freedom House, and board member of the Council on Foreign Relations and
the NATO Atlantic Council. Ackerman believes that "
the
talented execution of even the simplest nonviolent tactics can alter the psychology of a population and the behavior of a regime
."
He also believes that the consolidated efforts of hundreds of small organisations can have a cumulative effect and make it look
like there is a unity of opinion and effort. This explains why, in Ukraine, the West actively supported both the radical
nationalists and the liberals, which is basically like crossing a grass snake with a viper, given that these two groups have
radically different ideologies. A similar situation can be seen in Belarus, where the muscle was provided by home-grown
nationalists (symbolism associated with Nazi collaborators during the war was openly used at protests), while representatives of
sexual minorities were included on various opposition councils.
The
International
Center on Nonviolent Conflict
, which was founded by Ackerman and whose headquarters are in Washington, does similar work to
CANVAS. In partnership with Rutgers University (New Jersey), the centre has been running online courses for activists since 2012.
These not only cover the theory of protest movements and provide specific examples, but also adapt new techniques. It is
noticeable that the course developers are seeking out new frontiers in resistance movements – how to exploit culture and
religion, or how to target corporations (since corporations can be state-owned, by focusing on a problem related to the company's
activities, attention can then be turned to the government itself).
George
Soros's son Alexander Soros with Hashim Thachi
The activities of another institution, the United States Institute of Peace,
cover
52 states
, and, in a number of countries (such as China and Iran), they are carried out indirectly, using local agents and
manipulating facts to its advantage. Thus, a recent report on Russia's interest in conflict zones states that "
Russia's
activities in conflict zones usually directly or indirectly run counter to Western interests
." The truth, however, is that it
is the West's activities that run counter to the interests of Russia, which then has to respond in some way. Russia has no
military bases in the Americas, whereas there are NATO bases and US troops on Russia's borders. Russian troops are in Syria
legitimately, whereas US troops in the country are effectively occupiers.
The
Tavistock
Institute
in London is doing some fairly serious work in the field of social engineering and manipulation. Its main
activities are carried out under the ruse of supporting self-organisation and human relationships. Thus, the Tavistock Institute
began developing the sociotechnical systems theory in the 1950s, started putting it into practice in the 1980s, and is still
using it now. The proliferation of perverts around the world under the smokescreen of tolerance is largely due to this
organisation (an agenda being carried out under the politically neutral guise of "
Group
Relations
").
It can be seen from these examples that the locale for protest headquarters and for the systematic destruction of the foundations
of national identity is the same – the West, chiefly America.
Along with attempts to maintain tactical flexibility during protests, one can often see adjustments being made in response to the
circumstances. Thus, the slogan "Flowers are better than bullets" on the placards of Belarusian opposition groups is just a
reworking of the slogan "Food not Bombs" used in the decentralised anti-war campaign that originated in the US in the 1980s
before spreading to Europe. A branch of this movement appeared in Belarus in 2005 with the help of local anarchists. A feature of
the movement is the distribution of vegetarian food to the poor and the homeless. Depending on who is behind the campaign, local
political nuances are superimposed in a number of countries.
Bernard-Henri
Levy with former Belarus' presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya
Many protest movements rely on creativity. So, on 14 April 2020, Polish feminists
blocked
the traffic
on one of Warsaw's main streets. Although the police issued large fines (upwards of €6,000) to many of the
activists, no one is going to pay them, and the blocking of traffic was explained by the guidelines of the authorities themselves
to observe social distancing of two metres due to the pandemic. In the end, and with the help of lawyers, the draft bills were
passed to parliament, and a special commission has been appointed to review them. Thus, the feminists killed two birds with one
stone: they managed to troll the government's quarantine measures and also hold a protest that drew more attention to their
activities (which are directed against conservatives, including for the legalisation of abortion and the support of sexual
minorities).
One should also not forget the activities of individuals aimed at the destabilisation of various governments. Usually, they do it
out of ideological beliefs, often using their own money and working with international contacts. One such individual is the
French neoliberal philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who actively supported coups in Yugoslavia and Ukraine, terrorists in Libya and
Syria, and is currently helping Belarus opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who lost in the country's recent presidential
election.
George
Soros and his son Alexander Soros
George Soros's son,
Alexander
Soros
, is diligently carrying on his father's work by serving as deputy chair of the Open Society Foundations. Recently, he
has been making frequent visits to the Balkans, where he has been seen in the company of many senior politicians. In addition to
Europe, Alexander Soros often visits Myanmar and is involved in projects in several African countries.
The activities of these people and organisations represent a multi-level international network with multiple dimensions of
communication and hidden strategies prepared with an eye to the future.
Therefore, to establish an adequate response mechanism to current and future challenges, the activities of these groups,
individuals and institutions must be monitored at the systemic level – constantly, thoroughly and comprehensively.
Reposts are welcomed with the reference to ORIENTAL REVIEW.
Geopolitical analyst, Chief editor of Geopolitica.ru, founder and chief editor of Journal of Eurasian Affairs; head of the
administration of International Eurasian Movement.
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence
clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them
imaginary"
- H.L. Mencken
As the global pandemic grips world attention, completely unnoticed by mainstream media was
the release of a final report of
an academic study pertaining to another previously calamitous event of international
significance.
On March 25th, the conclusion of a four year investigation by researchers at the University
of Alaska Fairbanks was published which determined that the collapse of World Trade Center
Building 7 on September 11th, 2001 was not caused by fire. The peer-reviewed inquiry was funded
by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a nonprofit organization composed of more than
3,000 building architects and engineers who are a signatory to the group's formal appeal
calling for a new investigation into the three -- not two -- WTC skyscrapers destroyed
on 9/11. The researchers infer that the collapse of Building 7 was actually the result of a
controlled demolition:
"The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on
9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology)
and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our
study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous
failure of every column in the building."
With or without a pandemic, it is likely corporate media would have ignored the study
anyway, just as they have anything that contradicts the official story of 9/11. However, it is
notable that many have drawn parallels between the COVID-19 outbreak and the 9/11 attacks based
on the widespread changes to daily life as a result of the crisis going forward. Already there
is talk of nationwide lockdowns as a "new normal" with many rightly expressing concerns over
civil liberties, press freedoms, the surveillance state, and other issues just as there were
following 9/11. By the same measure, a false dichotomy is being established by political
gatekeepers in order to silence those who dare challenge the official account as to how the
coronavirus began. It is a stigmatization that is all too familiar to those who have never
believed the conventional narrative that 19 Arab hijackers loyal to Osama bin Laden armed only
with box-cutters were solely responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon on that fateful day.
There is a common misconception that to believe in so-called "conspiracy theories" is to
somehow lose sight of the bigger picture or systemic problems. Behind this phenomenon is a
mistakenly presumed conflict between understanding the broader, overarching system versus the
sinister motives of those in power who administer it -- when they are
inextricably linked. Political scientist Michael Parenti, who drew the ire of many of his
fellow left-wing colleagues for his work on the Kennedy assassination
, refers to it in his
lecture "Understanding Deep Politics" as a perceived incompatibility between " the
structural and the functional ." The anti-conspiracists wrongly assume that the more
impersonal or wider the lens, the more profound an analysis. By this logic, the elite are
absolved of conscious intent and deliberate pursuit of nefarious self-interest, as if
everything is done by incidental chance or out of incompetence. Not to say efficacy applies
without exception, but it has become a required gesture to disassociate oneself from
"conspiracies" to maintain credibility -- ironically even by those who are often
the target of such smears themselves.
This applies not only to mainstream media and academics, but even leading progressive
figures who have a mechanical, unthinking resistance to assigning intent or recognizing the
existence of hidden agendas. As a result, it disappears the class interests of the ruling elite
and ultimately assists them in providing cover for their crimes. With the exception of the
Kennedy assassination -- coincidentally the
subject of a new epic chart-topping song by Bob Dylan -- nowhere has there been more
hostility to 'conspiracism' than regarding the events of 9/11. Just as they assailed Parenti,
David Talbot and others for challenging the Warren Commission's 'lone gunman' theory, leading
figures on the left such as Noam Chomsky and
the late Alexander Cockburn railed against the 9/11 Truth movement and today it is often
wrongly equated with right-wing politics, an unlikely trajectory given it occurred under an
arch-conservative administration but an inevitable result of the pseudo-left's aversion to
"conspiracies." If polls are
any indication, the average American certainly disagrees with such elitist misleaders as to the
believability of the sham 9/11 Commission findings, yet another example of how out-of-touch the
faux-left is with ordinary people.
A more recent example was an article
by left-wing journalist Ben Norton proclaiming that to call 9/11 a false flag or an "inside
job" is " fundamentally a right-wing conspiracy ", in complete disregard of the many
dedicated truther activists on the left since its inception. Norton insists the 9/11 attacks
were simply "blowback", or an unintended consequence of previous U.S. foreign policy support
for the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviets during the 1980s which later gave birth
to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Norton argues " Al-Qaeda's unofficial strategic alliance with
the US eventually broke down " resulting in 9/11 as retaliation, completely overlooking
that Washington was still supporting jihadist factions during the 1990s in Bosnia (two of which
would be alleged 9/11 hijackers) and Kosovo in the Yugoslav wars against Serbia, even while the
U.S. was ostensibly pursuing bin Laden for the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998
and the USS Cole in 2000.
A 1997 Congressional document by the Republican Policy
Committee (RPC) throws light on how Washington never discontinued its practice in Afghanistan
of using jihadist proxies to achieve its foreign policy goals in the Balkans. Although it was a
partisan GOP attack meant to discredit then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, nevertheless the memo
accurately presents how the U.S. had " turned Bosnia into a Militant Islamic Base ":
"In short, the Clinton administration's policy of facilitating the delivery of arms to the
Bosnian Muslims made it the de facto partner of an international network of governments and
organizations pursuing their own agenda in Bosnia: the promotion of Islamic revolution in
Europe. That network not only involves Iran but Brunei, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia,
Sudan (a key ally of Iran), and Turkey, together with front groups supposedly pursuing
humanitarian and cultural activities. For example, one such group about which details have
come to light is the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), a Sudan-based, phoney humanitarian
organization which has been a major link in the arms pipeline to Bosnia. TWRA is believed to
be connected with such fixtures of the Islamic terror network as Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman (the
convicted mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) and Osama Bin Laden , a
wealthy Saudi émigré believed to bankroll numerous militant groups "
It was also in Bosnia where a raid was conducted in 2002 by local police at the Sarajevo
branch of a Saudi-based purported charitable organization, Benevolence International
Foundation, which was discovered to be a front for Al-Qaeda. Seized on the premises was a
document, dubbed the "Golden Chain" , which listed the major
financial sponsors of the terrorist organization to be numerous Saudi business and government
figures, including some of Osama bin Laden's own brothers. By the 9/11 Commission Report 's own
admission, this same fake Islamic charity " supported the Bosnian Muslims in their conflict
with Serbia " at the same time as the CIA.
It cannot go without mentioning that the common link between Al-Qaeda and subsequent
extremist groups like ISIS/Daesh and Boko Haram is the doctrine of Wahhabism, the puritanical
sect of Sunni Islam practiced in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and founded in the 18th century by
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the religious leader who formed an alliance with the founder of the
first Saudi state, Muhammad bin Saud, whose descendants make up the House of Saud royal family.
The ultra-orthodox teachings of Wahhabism were initially rejected in the Middle East but
reestablished by British colonialism which aligned with the Saud family in order to use their
intolerant strain of Islam to undermine the Ottoman empire in a divide-and-conquer strategy. In
a speech to the House of Commons in 1921, Winston Churchill admitted the Saudis to be "
intolerant, well-armed and bloodthirsty ."
This did not stop the British from supporting the House of Saud so long as it was in the
interest of Western imperialism, an unholy alliance which continues to this day. However,
U.S.-Saudi relations did come under scrutiny when the infamous 28 redacted pages of
the December 2002 report of the "Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before
and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001" conducted by the Senate and House Select
Committees on Intelligence were finally disclosed in 2016. The section revealed not only the
numerous U.S. intelligence failures in the lead-up to the attacks but the long suspected
culpability of Saudi Arabia, whose nationals were not the focus of counterterrorism because of
Riyadh's status as a U.S. ally. The declassified pages show that some of the hijackers, 15 of
them Saudi citizens, received financial and logistical support from individuals linked to the
Saudi government, which FBI sources believed at least two of which to be Saudi intelligence
officers. One of those Saudi agents received large payments from Princess Haifa, the wife of
Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a stipend from the latter's bank account which inevitably went
from the go-betweens to the sleeper cell.
President George W. Bush and Prince Bandar bin Sultan at Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas
in 2002
A key member of the House of Saud and then-Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar has
such a long and close relationship to the Bush family he was given the nickname "Bandar Bush."
For obvious reasons, when the congressional joint inquiry report was first published in 2003,
the 28-page portion on the Saudi ties to the attacks was completely censored at the insistence
of the Bush administration. Yet the Bush family's connection to the Gulf state kingdom is not
limited to the ruling monarchy but includes one of the petrodollar theocracy's other wealthiest
families -- the bin Laden family itself. While Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit
9/11 mostly whitewashed the real conspiracy of 9/11 , it did reveal that numerous
unquestioned members of the bin Laden family were given special treatment and suspiciously
evacuated on secret flights out of the U.S. shortly after the attacks in coordination with the
Saudi government.
The Bush-bin Laden connection goes all the way back to the beginning of George W. Bush's
business career prior to his political involvement in 1976 with the founding of an oil drilling
company, Arbusto Energy, whose earliest investors included a Texas businessman and fellow
reservist in the Texas Air National Guard, James R. Bath, who oddly enough was the American
liaison for Salem bin Laden, Osama's half brother. To put it differently, the bin Laden family
and its construction fortune helped finance Bush's start in the oil industry, a relationship
that would continue through the 1990s with Harken Energy, later the recipient of an offshore
oil contract in Iraq's reconstruction alongside Dick Cheney's Halliburton. The Bush dynasty's
financial ties to both the Saudi royals and bin Laden family went on as co-investors in the
Carlyle Group private equity firm where the elder Bush's previous government service contacts
were exploited for financial gain. In fact, on the morning of 9/11, Bush Sr. just happened to
be attending a Carlyle business conference where another bin Laden sibling was the guest of
honor in what we are supposed to believe is another astounding coincidence. Just days later,
Shafiq bin Laden would be spirited off on a chartered flight back to Saudi Arabia in an exodus
overseen by Prince Bandar himself.
Osama bin Laden himself also got an evacuation of sorts when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in
2001. It was legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh who first reported that
bin Laden and thousands of other Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters were suspiciously allowed to
escape to Pakistan in an evacuation dubbed the 'airlift of evil.' This was corroborated in a
leaked 2009 Hillary Clinton State Department email published by WikiLeaks regarding
a Senate report on the Battle of Tora Bora and bin Laden's escape where Clinton advisor Sidney
Blumenthal is shown discussing the controversial airlift as having been requested by Pakistani
President Pervez Musharraf and approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice
President Dick Cheney -- but don't dare call it a conspiracy:
"Gary Berntsen, the head of the CIA armed operation in eastern Afghanistan, is a major
source for the report. I am in contact with him and have heard his entire story at length,
key parts of which are not in his book, Jawbreaker, or in the Senate report. In particular ,
the story of the Kunduz airlift of the bulk of key AQ and Taliban leaders, at the request of
Musharaff and per order Cheney/Rumsfeld , is absent."
Could it have anything to do with just a few years earlier the Taliban visiting Texas when Bush was
Governor to discuss with the Unocal Corporation the construction of a gas pipeline through
Afghanistan into Pakistan? It is also well known that the Pakistani government and its
Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) had supported the Taliban for decades and during the
1980s had been the CIA's main conduit for supplying arms to the Afghan mujahideen, including
bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri's Maktab al-Khidamat, the organizational precursor to Al-Qaeda.
As shown in the documentary 9/11: Press for Truth , little in their relations changed in
the years between the Afghan-Soviet war and 9/11, as ISI director Mahmud Ahmed was reportedly
busted
wiring $100,000 to alleged hijacker ringleader Mohamed Atta not long before the WTC
attacks. Throughout 2001 both before and after 9/11, General Ahmed had repeatedly visited the
U.S. and met with top Pentagon and Bush administration officials, including CIA Director George
Tenet, making Prince Bandar not the only figure to have been caught financing the operation and
where a direct line can be drawn between the White House and the hijackers.
While Bandar has thus far eluded justice, one year after the release of the 28 pages
a
lawsuit was filed on behalf of the families of the victims against the government of Saudi
Arabia which presented new evidence that two years prior to the attacks in 1999, the Saudi
Embassy paid for the flights of two Saudi agents living undercover in the U.S. to fly from
Phoenix to Washington " in a dry run for the 9/11 attacks " where they attempted to
breach the cockpit and test flight security. This means the Saudi government was likely
involved in planning the attacks from the very beginning, in addition to providing the
subsidies and patsy hijacker personnel for the smokescreen of blaming Al-Qaeda and making bin
Laden the fall guy, whose links to 9/11 are tenuous at best. After all, the "confession" from
supposed planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was extracted only after his being water-boarded 183
times while bin Laden himself initially denied any role in the attacks before questionable
videos were released of his admittance.
The Saudi nationals who participated in the hijacking rehearsal were posing as students.
However, the Sunni dictatorship was not the only country conducting a mass espionage operation
in the U.S. prior to 9/11 under such a front. In the first half of 2001, several U.S. federal
law enforcement agencies documented more than 130 different instances of young Israelis impersonating "art
students" while aggressively trying to penetrate the security of various government and
military facilities as part of a Mossad spy ring. Several of the Israelis were found to be
living in locations within the near vicinity of the hijackers as if they were eavesdropping on
them. The discovery of the Israeli operation raised many questions, namely whether Mossad had
advanced knowledge or involvement in 9/11. Ironically, Fox News of all places was one of
the few outlets to cover the story in a
four-part series which never re-aired and was eventually scrubbed from the network
website.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/GnWSNI7rKf0
The Israeli "art student" mystery never gained traction in the rest of the media, much like
another suspicious case in the "
Dancing Israelis ", a smaller group of Mossad spies posing as furnishing movers who were
arrested in New Jersey on the morning of 9/11 taking celebratory pictures with the twin towers
burning in the background of the Manhattan skyline. The five men were not only physically
present at the waterfront prior to the first plane impact but found with thousands of dollars
in cash, box-cutters, fake passports, and Arab clothing after they were reported for suspicious
behavior and intercepted at the Lincoln tunnel heading into Manhattan. Initially misreported as
Arabs by the media, the men were connected to Mossad by an FBI database and held for five
months before their deportation to Israel while the owner of the front moving company fled to
Jerusalem before further questioning. It should be noted that if Israel were to have
participated in a 'false flag' attack on the U.S., it would not have been the first time.
During the Six-Day War in 1967, the Israeli Air Force and Navy launched an
unprovoked attack on the USS Liberty , a U.S. Navy spy ship that was surveilling the
Arab-Israeli conflict from international waters in the Mediterranean, an "accidental" assault
which killed 34 Americans in an attempt to blame Egypt and provoke U.S. intervention.
If Israel turned out to be co-conspirators with the Saudis, it too is not as unlikely a
scenario as it may seem. Wrongly assumed to be sworn enemies, it is an open secret that the two
British-created states have maintained a historical covert alliance since the end of World War I when
the first monarch of the modern Saudi state, King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, defeated his rival the
Sharif of Mecca who opposed the Balfour Declaration. Authored by British Foreign Secretary Lord
Balfour and presented to Zionist leader Baron Rothschild, the 1917 letter guaranteed a Jewish
homeland in Palestine by colonization with European Jews. Once Sharif was out the way, the
Zionist movement had the green light to move forward with its colonial project. Although Ibn
Saud publicly opposed Zionism, behind the scenes he negotiated with them through an
intermediary in his advisor, British agent St. John Philby, who proposed a £20 million
compensation to the Saudi king for delivering Palestine to the Jews.
Ibn Saud communicated his willingness to compromise in a 1940 letter from
Philby to Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist Organization and later the first
Israeli president. However, Philby himself was an anti-Zionist and sabotaged the plan by
leaking it to other Arab leaders who voiced their vehement opposition and it was only after
this exposure that the Saudi king claimed to have turned down the bribe, something the Zionists
would only solicit if they thought he would accept. Ever since, the ideologies of Saudi
Wahhabism and Israeli Zionism have been center to the West's destabilization of the Middle East
which contrary to misperceptions was not uniquely plagued by conflict
historically more than the Occident until the West nurtured Salafism and Zionism. Predictably,
discussing either the Saudi or Israeli role in 9/11 has been strictly forbidden in corporate
media, since both are among Washington's geo-strategic allies and each hold immense lobbying
power over large media institutions.
Less than five months after 9/11, Bush notoriously declared the nations of Iran, Iraq and
North Korea as comprising an "axis of evil" in his 2002 state of the union address. In reality,
the phrase is better suited to describe the tripartite of Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the U.S.
government itself who are likely the real trio of conspirators behind 9/11. The infamous choice
of words were attributed to neoconservative pundit and Bush speechwriter, David Frum, who
claimed to have taken inspiration from Franklin D. Roosevelt's " a date that will live
infamy " speech given the day after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. It was a
continuation of a theme present in the manifesto of the neoconservative cabal authored one year
prior to 9/11 -- "
Rebuilding America's Defenses " by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) think
tank, whose members included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Jeb Bush. The
strategic military blueprint called for a massive increase in U.S. defense spending in order to
" fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars" before ominously
predicting:
"The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be
a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- likea new Pearl
Harbor."
Ten members of PNAC would be subsequently appointed to positions in the Bush White House
where their vision of a "new Pearl Harbor" conveniently materialized. Then again, there is
plenty of
evidence that Pearl Harbor itself was a 'false flag', or that U.S. intelligence and
President Franklin D. Roosevelt had
foreknowledge of an impending Japanese attack on the naval base in Oahu, Hawaii, on
December 7th, 1941. As pointed out by the film Loose Change, it is probable that
Roosevelt allowed it to happen on purpose in order to win public support for a U.S. entry into
the European theatre of World War II, a move opposed by a majority of Americans prior to the
'surprise' Japanese attack. Given what is known about Pearl Harbor and the abandoned
Operation Northwoods , which proposed both fabricating and committing terrorist attacks on
civilian aircraft to be pinned on Fidel Castro in order to justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba in
1962, there are no grounds to assume that such false flag operations were ever phased out of
military procedure before 9/11 or since.
Loose Change also made a useful historical analogy between 9/11 and the Reichstag
fire, the 1933 arson attack on the German parliament building that occurred a month after Adolf
Hitler was inaugurated as Chancellor and pinned on a 24-year old half-blind Dutch communist
named Marinus van der Lubbe. While there is no denying the incident was used a pretext by the
Nazi regime to consolidate power and suspend law and order, there is still a heated debate
between historians as to whether van der Lubbe was the real culprit. However, it was
coincidentally in 2001 when a group of historians
uncovered evidence that a Nazi stormtrooper who died under mysterious circumstances in 1933
had previously confessed to prosecutors that members of Hitler's Storm Detachment had set fire
to the edifice under orders from paramilitary leader Karl Ernst, lending credence to the widely
held suspicion that it was a Nazi-engineered 'false flag' all along.
Most Americans are unaware that a similar coup d'etat nearly took place during the same year
in the United States in an attempt to remove President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install an
authoritarian government modeled on Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany as part of a scheme hatched
by an inner circle of right-wing bankers otherwise known as the the 'Business Plot.' It was a
conspiracy that only became public after it was heroically thwarted by a whistleblower in
decorated Marine Corps veteran turned anti-imperialist, Major General Smedley Butler, after he
was recruited to form the junta. Incredibly, one of the prominent business figures implicated
in the putsch was none other than future Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush , George H.W.
Bush's father and George W. Bush's grandfather, who at the time was the director and
shareholder of a bank owned by German industrialist and prominent Nazi financier
Fritz Thyssen seized by the U.S. government under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
After his transformation, in 1935 Smedley Butler famously penned War is a Racket and
there is perhaps no better phrase that would sum up the so-called 'War on Terror' today. Not
only did the American Reichstag fire of 9/11 trigger a domestic police state transformation
that overrode the U.S. constitution in an American equivalent of the 1933 Enabling Act and the
Heimatschutz( "homeland protection" ) defense forces with the passing
of the USA-Patriot Act and founding of the Department of Homeland Security, but it fulfilled
the prophecy of political scientist Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations in a
face-off between Islam and Christianity abroad. The prediction that religion and culture would
be the primary source of geopolitical conflict in the post-Cold War world was an apocalyptic
paradigm envisioned by right-wing orientalist philosophers like Huntington and Bernard Lewis
which the PNAC neocon ideologues put into practice. Today, the ongoing COVID-19 crisis appears
likely to have similar broad and long-term political, social and economic consequences and
those who have doubts about the official explanation for the pandemic can hardly be blamed for
their distrust given this history unless the lessons of 9/11 have gone unlearned.
It's hard to have much sympathy for the American people at this point. They have looked
the other way regarding all of this as long as they have their brand of liar in the White
House.
Whether they can be duped into killing more peasants elsewhere or are left to their hunger
games here at home, this country is finished.
+1. Sadly, your comment is remarkably accurate. I don't know whether America is FINISHED
just yet, though, because there's still plenty remaining to pillage from the American
SHEEPLE.
Oh wait, what is the so-called "National Debt" now? (Answer: $22-23 TRILLION).
Of course, despite the fact that the so-called "National Debt" is MATHEMATICALLY NEVER
RE-PAYABLE, the more important fact, is that We, the People, DO NOT OWE the G.D. Central
Bankers ONE RED PENNY.
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous
to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary"
- H.L. Mencken
From the "Jew" Henry Kissinger:
"Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order;
tomorrow they with be grateful! This is especially true if they were told there was an
outside threat from beyond whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence.
It is then that all peoples of the world will pledge with world leaders to deliver them from
this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario,
individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being
granted to them by their world government."
- Henry Kissinger in an address to the Bilderberg meeting at Evian, France, May 21,
1992.
Thos intelligence nets are becoming more and more sophisticated. They essentially represent a
hidden political force that influences the elections.
From comments: "This is so convoluted and Byzantine and no one is offering documentation,
just allegations."
Notable quotes:
"... Rarely in the news, however, is the role played by Israeli cybersecurity startups in the creation of the Russiagate narrative itself. Incubated within the Israeli military apparatus and benefiting from an uninterrupted stream of billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars, these "private Mossads" have been present behind the scenes throughout the numerous Russia-related scandals fomented by the mainstream press to sow partisan discord among the American electorate and line the pockets of network executives. ..."
"... The Senate's inquiries uncovered a consistent thread of IDF-linked cybersecurity firms and intelligence assets coordinating and facilitating meetings between the coterie of Russian characters that make up the Russiagate universe and the Trump campaign, including protagonists like Guccifer 2.0, the hacker who released Hilary Clinton's infamous emails to Wikileaks via a cell phone registered in Israel. ..."
"... "These guys came out of the military intelligence army unit, and it's like coming out with a triple Ph.D. from MIT. The amount of knowledge these guys have in terms of cybersecurity, cyber-intelligence [is] just so beyond what you could get [with] a normal education that it's just unique there are hundreds and hundreds of Israeli start-up companies that the founders are guys who came out of this unit." ..."
"... Michael Flynn, who was himself also working in an advisory capacity with the "consortium of cyber-spy companies run by former Israeli intelligence officers" known as the NSO Group, that is comprised of several of the Israeli startups summoned before the committee for voluntary, closed-door testimony. ..."
"... One of the NSO companies questioned by the Senate committee in relation to Russian interference, Psy-Group, is currently under investigation in California, where it was caught red-handed actually trying to rig a local election for a paying customer. ..."
"... Butina's former lover, Paul Erickson joked about being a CIA asset and had built a phony reputation as a man of staunch moral Christian values. Erickson worked for several Republican campaigns dating back to the late '80s, including a stint as national policy director for Pat Buchanan's '92 White House run. He first achieved international notoriety as Mobutu Sese Seko's lawyer, reportedly accepting a $30,000 lobbying contract to obtain a U.S. visa for the African despot, which was ultimately denied. ..."
"... It was Erickson's long-standing ties to the NRA and the organization's former president David Keene, which set the stage for the Maria Butina story as a Russian infiltrator looking for " access to U.S. political organizations ." Erickson had worked with Keene as a registered foreign agent since the 1990s and formed part of the NRA's efforts to forge closer ties to Israel since at least 2011. ..."
"... A con-artist by most accounts, Erickson is described by a Republican legislator as "the single biggest phony I've ever met in South Dakota politics." South Dakota was where Yale-educated Erickson came up in the political arena and where he's left a long trail of burned business associates and friends. In 2019, Erickson pled guilty to wire fraud and money laundering , admitting he had bilked 78 people of $2.3 Million over 22 years and was sentenced this past July to seven years in federal prison. ..."
A Senate investigation reveals that a consortium of Israeli hacking and surveillance firms
coordinated and facilitated meetings between Trump campaign operatives and Russia during the
2016 campaign, but they don't really want to talk about it.
Alleged Russian interference in the 2020 presidential election is headline news, once again,
as a Ukrainian lawmaker is charged by the Trump administration "in a sweeping plot to sow
distrust in the American political process," reports the Associated Press.
Microsoft also made claims that it detected "hacking attempts targeting U.S. political
campaigns, parties and consultants" by agents from Russia, China, and Iran. In a September 10
blog
post , Microsoft's Tom Burt, Corporate Vice President of Customer Security & Trust,
listed three groups from each region that Microsoft "observed" carrying out their cyber
operations.
Rarely in the news, however, is the role played by Israeli cybersecurity startups in the
creation of the Russiagate narrative itself. Incubated within the Israeli military apparatus
and benefiting from an uninterrupted stream of billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars, these
"private Mossads" have been present behind the scenes throughout the numerous Russia-related
scandals fomented by the mainstream press to sow partisan discord among the American electorate
and line the pockets of network executives.
Evidence of their activities has been exposed -- though not pursued -- in the latest volume
of a U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee investigation on Russian interference in the 2016
presidential election, which shows how then-candidate Donald Trump personally embarked on a
parallel campaign on behalf of Israel to block a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements
in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Originally
submitted by Egypt, UNSCR 2334 strips Israeli settlements
beyond the 1967 borders of any "
legal validity " in the eyes of the international community and brands them a "flagrant
violation under international law." Russia, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, had
refused all of the advances made by Trump's operatives to use its veto power against the
measure, and Trump himself would
prevail upon Egyptian President al-Sisi -- whom Trump calls his "
favorite dictator " -- to
withdraw the declaration . Together with Israeli pressure, UNSCR 2334 seemed destined to
languish in obscurity as Egypt
acquiesced and delayed the vote to "permit them to conduct an additional meeting of the
Arab League's foreign ministers to work on the resolution's wording."
The Senate's inquiries uncovered a consistent thread of IDF-linked cybersecurity firms
and intelligence assets coordinating and facilitating meetings between the coterie of Russian
characters that make up the Russiagate universe and the Trump campaign, including protagonists
like Guccifer 2.0, the hacker who
released Hilary Clinton's infamous emails to Wikileaks via a cell phone registered in
Israel.
George Birnbaum, a former chief of staff to Benjamin Netanyahu and GOP operative, told the
committee how Trump aide Rick Gates had inquired about using "Israeli technology" to collect
dirt on opponent Hillary Clinton at a March 2016 meeting, explaining to the senators what would
be so attractive about Israeli companies, specifically:
"These guys came out of the military intelligence army unit, and it's like coming out
with a triple Ph.D. from MIT. The amount of knowledge these guys have in terms of
cybersecurity, cyber-intelligence [is] just so beyond what you could get [with] a normal
education that it's just unique there are hundreds and hundreds of Israeli start-up companies
that the founders are guys who came out of this unit."
The unit Birnbaum is referring to is the IDF's Unit 8200, where these "hundreds and
hundreds" of tech startups are born right in the bowels of the Israeli national security state
and propagate throughout the world and the United States, in particular.
Described as " private Mossads "
for hire, many of the Israeli hacking and surveillance firms that moved behind the scenes,
brokering meetings between Trump's people and Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska during the
height of the so-called Russian "collusion," were working through a "key middle man" with close
ties to then-Trump National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, who was himself also working
in an advisory capacity with the "consortium of cyber-spy companies run by former Israeli
intelligence officers" known as the NSO Group, that is comprised of several of the Israeli
startups summoned before the committee for voluntary, closed-door testimony.
While the American public was fed one Russophobic scandal after another, and Robert Mueller
held court in the press for two years straight, no one -- especially Mueller -- was paying
attention to this perverse network of Israeli surveillance companies who operated the virtual
scaffold upon which the Russiagate narrative was being constructed and whose fellow Unit 8200
graduates in other subsectors of the cybersecurity industry are deeply ensconced in highly
questionable activities surrounding the coming 2020 election.
THE NSO GROUP
The NSO
Group gained notoriety when it was identified as the developer of Pegasus, the iPhone
spyware that
was found installed on slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi's phone in the days leading
up to his gruesome death. NSO's cell phone tracking technology has been associated with other
ghastly events, such as the scandal involving Pegasus in Mexico, where a team of international
investigators looking into the disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa was targeted by the
spyware, as well as Mexican
journalists and their families.
One of the NSO companies questioned by the Senate committee in relation to Russian
interference, Psy-Group, is currently under investigation in California, where it was
caught red-handed
actually trying to rig a local election for a paying customer. Another, Circles, was
founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer and is "known for covertly intercepting phone
calls, text messages, and tracking locations of unaware citizens," according to a report by
Forensic News .
In 2018, Haaretz published
an expose on the company disclosing the extent to which Circles and the Israeli espionage
industry is helping "world dictators hunt dissidents and gays," among other nefarious
opportunities available in the "global commerce" of surveillance technologies.
An NSO rep peddles software services at annual European Police Congress in Berlin, April 28,
2020. Hannibal Hanschke | Reuters
The middle man the Senate investigation identified is Walter Soriano; singled out for his
association with several Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska and Dmitry Rybolovlev, who
bought
Trump's West Palm Beach mansion in 2008. The Senate report accuses Soriano and Israeli
cybersecurity companies of coordinating "between the Trump Campaign and Russia," but fails to
pursue the matter beyond that.
The UN resolution denouncing Israeli settlements would pass on December 23, 2016, after four
temporary Security Council members, Malaysia, New Zealand, Senegal, and Venezuela reportedly
took matters into their own hands and moved the vote forward. UNSCR 2334 became official as
a result of a historic breach of established pro-Israel policy by the United States, which
abstained from the vote. Widely reported as Obama's "
parting shot " to Netanyahu and the incoming administration, the passing of the resolution
went against Obama's own record of using U.S.' veto power to banish similar
proposals .
President-elect Donald Trump would take office in a matter of weeks and the Mueller
investigation kicked off the barrage of Russophobic content peddled over the digital airwaves
night after night. Stories like
Maria Butina's were plastered all over the media to buttress the Russiagate
narrative.
THE LEGEND OF MARIA BUTINA
Butina's former lover, Paul Erickson joked
about being a CIA asset and had built a phony reputation as a man of staunch moral
Christian values. Erickson worked for several Republican campaigns dating back to the late
'80s, including a stint as
national policy director for Pat Buchanan's '92 White House run. He first achieved
international notoriety as Mobutu Sese Seko's lawyer, reportedly accepting a $30,000 lobbying
contract to obtain a U.S. visa for the African despot, which was ultimately denied.
It was Erickson's long-standing ties to the NRA and the organization's former president
David Keene, which set the stage for the Maria Butina story as a Russian infiltrator looking
for "
access to U.S. political organizations ." Erickson had
worked with Keene as a registered foreign agent since the 1990s and formed part of the
NRA's efforts to forge
closer ties to Israel since at least 2011.
Prosecutors would paint Butina as a seductress, ensnaring Erickson in a "duplicitous
relationship," but it was the cunning GOP operative who first spotted Butina during a 2013
trip to Moscow with Keene. Butina and Erickson would meet again in Israel one year later
where they would begin their 'love affair' during which he would become "integral to Butina's
activities," assisting the Russian gun enthusiast "in developing relationships with individuals
and organizations involved in U.S. politics," according to the Senate Intelligence
Committee.
Maria Butina poses for a photo at a shooting range in Moscow, April 22, 2012. Pavel Ptitsin
| AP
A con-artist
by most accounts, Erickson is
described by a Republican legislator as "the single biggest phony I've ever met in South
Dakota politics." South Dakota was where Yale-educated Erickson came up in the political arena
and where he's left a long trail of burned business associates and friends. In 2019, Erickson
pled guilty to
wire fraud and money laundering , admitting he had bilked 78 people of $2.3 Million over 22
years and was sentenced this past July to
seven years in federal prison.
The NRA has been forging ties to the Israeli security state for years now. In 2013, Trump's
former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, joined a delegation of 30 in Jerusalem for a
10-day tour of Israel's police institutions. The honorary NRA member stated on that
occasion, that Israel could "serve as a model for American security." The legend of Maria
Butina, itself, was seeded in Israel that same year when an "obscure" Israeli gun-rights group
posted on
Facebook that she had announced to have signed a cooperation agreement with the NRA
and "neighboring countries" to promote gun rights at a meeting with its members.
Butina would meet with Erickson and Keene two weeks later in Moscow, along with Alexander
Torshin, former deputy governor of Russia's central bank and lifetime NRA member. Torshin, who
has been targeted by U.S. sanctions, traveled with Butina to the United States to "discuss
U.S.-Russian economic relations" in April 2015. The pair met with several senior American
officials, like Federal Reserve vice chairman and former Israel central bank chief, Stanley
Fischer; the Treasury undersecretary for international affairs, Nathan Sheets and others in a
meeting "
moderated " by AIG CEO Maurice "Hank" Greenberg. The details of the high-level meeting, two
months before Donald Trump made his announcement to run for president, have never been made
public.
Feature photo | Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee
business meeting to consider authorization for subpoenas relating to the Crossfire Hurricane
investigation, the code name for the counterintelligence investigation undertaken by the FBI in
2016 and 2017 into links between Trump and Russian officials, June 11, 2020. Carolyn Kaster |
AP
Raul Diego is a MintPress News Staff Writer, independent photojournalist, researcher,
writer and documentary filmmaker.
I always said it was Israeli influence not Russian. How obvious can it get. But we have
Trump constantly kissing the Israeli ass while being kicked in the teeth and Congress bending
over backwards pedaling lies about Russia for Israeli benefit.
Is there anyone on our side in DC?
Ok, so we have the israelis, synonymous with deep state, responsible for wtc '93, wtc
9/11, the arab spring, the afghan conflict, the iraq conflict, problems with Iran, training
antifa/blm, equipping and training the messican cartels, the farc, and tupac amaru. Being the
worlds controlling supplier of MDMA. As well as giving U.S. technology to the chinese, and
direct involvement with the release of covid 19. And hiring osama bin laden to build a
highway in the sudan, then embezzling $800 million from bin ladens project, and blaming it on
the U.S. It's time for the world to put their collective heads back into where the sun does
shine.
"... Each of these two camps wields rhetoric that masks its true practice. Democrats and Republicans pose as heralds of the "free world" in the face of "dictatorships", as defenders of racial, gender and sexual orientation discrimination, and as champions of the fight against "global warming". The Jacksonians, for their part, take turns denouncing the corruption, perversity and ultimately hypocrisy of their predecessors while calling to fight for their nation and not for the empire. ..."
"... The two camps have in common only the same cult of force; whether it is at the service of the empire (Democrats and Republicans) or the nation (Jacksonians). ..."
The U.S. 2020 presidential campaign pits two radically different visions of the United States: empire or nation?
On the one hand, Washington's claim to dominate the world by "containment" – a strategy articulated by George Kennan in 1946 and
followed by all presidents until 2016 – and on the other hand, the rejection of imperialism and the desire to facilitate the fortunes
of Americans in general – a strategy articulated by President Andrew Jackson (1829-37) and taken up only by President Donald Trump
(2017-20).
Each of these two camps wields rhetoric that masks its true practice. Democrats and Republicans pose as heralds of the "free
world" in the face of "dictatorships", as defenders of racial, gender and sexual orientation discrimination, and as champions of
the fight against "global warming". The Jacksonians, for their part, take turns denouncing the corruption, perversity and ultimately
hypocrisy of their predecessors while calling to fight for their nation and not for the empire.
The two camps have in common only the same cult of force; whether it is at the service of the empire (Democrats and Republicans)
or the nation (Jacksonians).
The fact that the Jacksonians unexpectedly became a majority in the country and took control of the Republican Party adds to the
confusion, but should not confuse Trumpism with what the Republican ideology has been since World War II.
In reality, Democrats and Republicans tend to be well-to-do people or professionals in new technologies, while Jacksonians – like
the "yellow vests" in France – are rather poor and professionally tied to the land from which they cannot escape.
... ... ...
The Jacksonian agenda
As soon as he took office, Donald Trump questioned the Rumsfeld/Cebrowsky strategy of annihilating the state structures of all the
countries of the "Broader Middle East" without exception and announced his wish to bring home the troops lost in the "war without
end". This goal remains at the top of his priorities in 2020 ("Stop Endless Wars and Bring Our Troops Home").
As a result, he excluded the Director of the CIA and the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee from regular meetings of the National
Security Council. In so doing, he deprived the supporters of imperialism of their main tool of conquest.
There followed a battle for the presidency of this council with the indictment of General Michael T. Flynn, then his replacement
by General H. R. McMaster, the exceptionalist John R. Bolton, and finally Robert C. O'Brien.
In May 2017, Donald Trump called on U.S. allies to immediately cease their support for jihadists charged with implementing the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski
strategy. This was the Riyadh speech to the Sunni heads of state and then to NATO heads of state and government. President Trump
had declared NATO obsolete before changing his mind. However, he obtained not the abandonment of Russia's policy of containment,
but the halving of the credits used for this purpose and the allocation of the funds thus preserved to the fight against jihadism.
In doing so, it partially stopped making NATO an instrument of imperialism and turned it into a defensive alliance. It has therefore
demanded that its members contribute to its budget. Support for jihadism, however, was pursued by the supporters of imperialism with
private means, notably the KKR Fund.
Hence his watchwords: "Wipe Out Global Terrorists Who Threaten to Harm Americans" and "Get Allies to Pay their Fair Share.
Like the Democrats and Republicans, the Jacksonian Donald Trump is committed to restoring the capabilities of his armies ("Maintain
and Expand America's Unrivaled Military Strength"). Unlike his predecessors, he did not seek to transform the Pentagon's delusional
management by privatizing one department at a time, but rather developed a plan to recruit researchers to compete technologically
once again with the Russian and Chinese armies.
Only Donald Trump's desire to regain primacy in missile matters is supported by Democrats and Republicans, although they do not agree
on how to achieve it ("Build a Great Cybersecurity Defense System and Missile Defense System") : the tenant of the White House wants
the USA to equip itself alone with these weapons that it can eventually deploy on the territory of its allies, while its opponents
want to involve the allies in order to maintain their hold on them. From the point of view of the Democrats and Republicans, the
problem is obviously not withdrawing from the Cold War disarmament treaties to build a new arsenal, but the loss of means of diplomatic
pressure on Russia.
A professional politician, Joe Biden hopes to restore the imperial status of the former First World Power.
The program of Democrats and non-party Republicans
Joe Biden proposes to focus on three objectives: (1) reinvigorate democracy (2) train the middle class to cope with globalization
(3) regain global leadership.
Reinvigorate democracy
: in his words, this means basing public
action on the "informed consent" of Americans. In doing so, he used Walter Lipmann's 1922 terminology, according to which democracy
presupposes "manufacturing consent". This theory was discussed at length by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in 1988. It obviously
has nothing to do with the definition formulated by President Abraham Lincoln: "Democracy is government of the people, by the people,
for the people".
Joe Biden believes he is achieving his goal by restoring the morality of public action through the practice of "political correctness".
For example, he condemns "the horrible practice [of President Trump] of separating families and placing the children of immigrants
in private prisons," without saying that President Trump was merely applying a democratic law to show its futility. Or he announces
that he wants to reaffirm the condemnation of torture that President Trump justified, without saying that the latter, like President
Obama, has already banned the practice while maintaining life imprisonment without trial in Guantánamo.
He announced his intention to convene a Summit for Democracy to fight against corruption, to defend the "Free World" against authoritarian
regimes, and to advance human rights. In view of his definition of democracy, it is a question of uniting allied states by denouncing
scapegoats for what is wrong (the "corrupt") and promoting human rights in the Anglo-Saxon sense and especially not in the French
sense. That is to say, to stop police violence and not to help citizens to participate in decision-making. This summit will launch
an appeal to the private sector so that new technologies cannot be used by authoritarian states to monitor their citizens (but the
USA and its NSA can always use them in the interest of the "Free World").
Finally, Joe Biden concludes this chapter by highlighting his role in the Transatlantic Commission for Electoral Integrity alongside
his friends, former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who overthrew the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, and Michael Chertoff,
former US Secretary of Homeland Security, who put all US citizens under surveillance. Not forgetting John Negroponte who organized
the Contras in Nicaragua and Daesh in Iraq.
Educating the middle class to cope with globalization
. Joe Biden
believes that the politics that have been pursued since the dissolution of the USSR have led to the rapid disappearance of the middle
class, and that training the remaining middle class in the use of new technologies will prevent the relocation of their jobs.
Renewing U.S. leadership
. In the name of democracy, this means
stopping the rise of "populists, nationalists and demagogues. This formulation helps us understand that democracy, according to Joe
Biden, is not only the fabrication of consent, but also the eradication of the popular will. If demagogues pervert democratic institutions,
populists serve the popular will and nationalists serve the community.
The
Oval Office of the White House is looking for a tenant.
Joe Biden then specifies that he will stop wars "forever"; a formulation that seems to support the same goal as the Jacksonians,
but differs in terminology. It is in fact a question of validating the current adaptation of the system to the limits imposed by
President Trump: why make US soldiers die abroad when one can pursue the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy with jihadists at a lower cost?
All the more so since when he was only an opposition senator, Joe Biden gave his name to the plan to partition Iraq that the Pentagon
was trying to impose.
A verse follows on the enlargement of NATO to include Latin American, African and Pacific allies. Far from being obsolete, the Alliance
will once again become the heart of U.S. imperialism.
Finally, Joe Biden pleads for the renewal of the 5+1 agreement with Iran and disarmament treaties with Russia. The agreement with
President Hassan Rohani aims to classically divide Muslim countries into Sunni and Shia, while the disarmament treaties aim to confirm
that the Biden administration would not envisage a global confrontation, but the continued containment of its competitor.
The program of the Democratic Party candidate and non-party Republicans concludes with the assurance of joining the Paris Accord
and taking leadership in the fight against global warming. Joe Biden specifies that he will not give gifts to China, which is relocating
its most polluting industries along the Silk Road. On the other hand, he omits to say that his friend, Barack Obama, before entering
politics, was the drafter of the statutes of the Chicago Carbon Emissions Trading Exchange. The fight against global warming is not
so much an ecological issue as a matter for bankers.
Conclusion
It must be said that everything is opposed to a clarification. Four years of upheavals by President Trump have only succeeded in
replacing the "endless wars" with a low-intensity private war. There are certainly far fewer deaths, but it is still war.
The elites who enjoy imperialism are not ready to give up their privileges.
So it is to be feared that the U.S. will be forced to go through an internal conflict, a civil war, and break up like the Soviet
Union once did.
The president is not an evangelical Christian; he's not Catholic. Unlike the previous
national Republican standard-bearer, he is not a Latter Day Saint. And despite unassailable
status as a Vladimir Putin puppet, he's interestingly not joined the Orthodox Church, which the
Russian strongman has in some ways empowered. When Donald Trump speaks about his
Presbyterianism, he speaks about it as I do: awkwardly, as an exoticism from America's mainline
past.
"I'm a Protestant, I'm a Presbyterian," Trump said in June 2015, the day after descending
the escalator in Manhattan. There are entertaining reads of Trump as a sort of lunatic
optimist, owing to a childhood association with the Americana positive thinker Norman Vincent
Peale -- that he is a devotee of something akin to the "The Secret," (released back when
the future president was hawking Trump Vodka). But one look at the commander-in-chief's acerbic
Twitter feed tells us if he is an insistent positive thinker, he's a hidden one.
The status of America's Christians as obvious rubes has been a familiar refrain of the Trump
presidency. It is as it was then, if with a different flavor, during the last Republican White
House. But now they're being outright had, so goes the thinking. Unlike with the born-again,
younger Bush, the Religious Right's embrace of Trump -- a divorcee egoist who shares beds with
adult film stars -- should tell you all you need to know. In many cases, goes the argument, it
tells you a story of an immoral minority, if the
debacle at Liberty University this summer is any indication, and as traditional
Christianity is ever more sidelined from culture. This is the death rattle.
So you'll have to forgive convinced Christians their jubilation on Saturday as Trump
nominates his third Supreme Court justice in three-and-a-half years. It's already more than
George W. Bush did in two terms, ditto his father, and if the White House and Republicans are
successful in the Senate -- as looks likely -- Trump will instantly surpass both Bill Clinton
and Barack Obama in his impact on the Court. You'll have to pardon the country's dumb set for
thinking to themselves maybe, just maybe they made the right bet four years ago.
My sources in the capital are unanimous: President Donald Trump is likely to name Amy Coney
Barrett, 48, to the Supreme Court on Saturday. She is from Louisiana; she went to Notre Dame
Law; she is a favorite of American Catholics; she is the mother of seven children. She's poised
to succeed the woman she replaces,
Ruth Bader Ginsburg , in icon status, just for the other side.
I like how everyone who writes about Trump feels the urge to proclaim they're morally
superior to him. To idiots like Mills, adultery is a bigger moral sin than killing thousands
of people in wars that are based on lies, which is why the "born again Christian" George
Dubya Bush is morally superior to Trump in their eyes despite Bush's obvious war crimes.
"The status of America's Christians as obvious rubes has been a familiar refrain of the
Trump presidency."
"so you'll have to forgive convinced Christians their jubilation"
No matter how many times ya'll claim it, "Christian" is not synonymous with "Trump
Supporter". Many, many Christians are against Trump. The existence of the Black church alone
should be enough to disabuse even the most unobservant pundit of the idea that to be a
Christian is to be a Republican. We are Christians too, which is why we are not Trump
supporters.
I tend to think conservative Christians will once again be disappointed with the Court.
Ms. Barrett has said repeatedly that her religious beliefs have no influence on her
interpretation and understanding of the law and the Supreme Court's role in it. Overturning
Roe v Wade, an almost 50 year old decision at this point, is extremely unlikely regardless of
who is on the Court.
While I would like to see it overturned myself and returned to state jurisdictions, I just
don't see how that can happen at this point.
"" President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday to
stop funding to federal government contractors who hold critical race theory training
sessions."
YES!! "Silence is complicity" as leftarded sheep often bleat, and silence in the face of
this ultra-racist bullsh!t has gone on far too long. Never should've been allowed to begin
with.
When Vladimir Putin got charge of Russia, there was no sign that he would do better than the
drunk he had replaced. An ex KGB officer seemed like a choice more driven by nostalgia rather
than ideology, but Putin had many more assets going for him than first met the eyes:
patriotism, humanism, a sense of justice, cunning ruse, a genius economist friend named Sergey
Glazyev whom openly despised the New World Order, but above all, he embodied the reincarnation
of the long lost Russian ideology of total political and economical independence. After a few
years spent at draining the Russian swamp from the oligarchs and mafiosis that his stumbling
predecessor had left in his trail of empty bottles, Vlad rolled his sleeves and got to
work.
Because his opponents had been looting the planet for 250 years through colonization insured
by a military dominance, Vlad knew that he had to start by building an invincible military
machine. And he did. He came up with different types of hypersonic missiles that can't be
stopped, the best defensive systems on the planet, the best electronic jamming systems, and the
best planes. Then to make sure that a nuclear war wouldn't be an option, he came up with stuff
which nightmares are made of, such as the Sarmat, the Poseidon and the Avangard, all
unstoppable and able to destroy any country in a matter of a few hours.
Putin said that Russia is the only country in the world that has hypersonic weapons even
though its military spending is a fraction of the U.S. military budget. Russian Defense
Minister Sergei Shoigu, left, and Chief of General Staff of Russia Valery Gerasimov, right,
attend the meeting.
With a new and unmatched arsenal, he could proceed to defeat any NATO force or any of its
proxies, as he did starting in September 2015 in Syria. He proved to every country that
independence from the NWO banking system was now a matter of choice. Putin not only won the
Syrian war, but he won the support of many New World Order countries that suddenly switched
sides upon realizing how invincible Russia had become. On a diplomatic level, it also got
mighty China by its side, and then managed to protect independent oil producers such as
Venezuela and Iran, while leaders like Erdogan of Turkey and Muhammad Ben Salman of Saudi
Arabia decided to side with Russia, who isn't holding the best poker hand, but the whole deck
of cards.
Ending in the conclusion that Putin now controls the all-mighty oil market, the unavoidable
energy resource that lubricates economies and armies, while the banksters' NATO can only watch,
without any means to get it back. With the unbelievable results that Putin has been getting in
the last five years, the New World Order suddenly looks like a house of cards about to crumble.
The Empire of Banks has been terminally ill for five years, but it's now on morphine, barely
realizing what's going on.
Tragedy and hope
Since there is no hope in starting WW3 which is lost in advance, the last banzai came out of
the bushes in the shape of a virus and the ensuing media creation of a fake pandemic. The main
focus was to avoid a catastrophic hyperinflation of the humongous mass of US dollar that no one
wants anymore, to have time to implement their virtual world crypto-currency, as if the
chronically failing bankers still have any legitimacy to keep controlling our money supplies.
It seemed at first that the plan could work. That's when Vlad took out his revolver to start
the Russian roulette game and bankers blew their brains out upon the pressure on the
trigger.
He called a meeting with OPEC and killed the price of oil by refusing to lower Russia's
production, taking the barrel to under 30 dollars. Without any afterthought and certainly even
less remorse, Vlad killed the costly Western oil production. All the dollars that had been
taken out of the market had to be re-injected by the Fed and other central banks to avoid a
downslide and the final disaster. By now, our dear bankers are out of solutions.
... ... ..
The New World Order is facing the two most powerful countries on the planet, and this fake
pandemic changed everything. It showed how desperate the banksters are, and if we don't want to
end up with nuclear warheads flying in both directions, Putin and Trump have to stop them
now.
Terminate the BIS, the World Bank, the IMF, the European Central bank, the EU, NATO, now.
Our world won't be perfect, but it might get much better soon.
Easter resurrection is coming. This might get biblical.
By now, readers are no doubt familiar with the sight of angry mobs smashing windows, looting
stores, and harassing pedestrians and street diners around the country , supposedly in the name
of advocating for the rights of black Americans. Around the country, these mobs are diverse and
have diverse motives, ranging from simply wanting to loot and get free stuff to being driven by
deeply held ideological beliefs. However, one can't help but notice that in many places a
significant number of those causing disturbances are not the subjects of the state oppression
in question, but are often white and sometimes even affluent, and as a result are almost
completely isolated from the consequences of their destructive sprees.
Portland, site of over a hundred straight days of protests and often violent rioting, seems
like the poster child for this phenomenon. Portland is, in fact, the whitest big city in the US.
In New York City, the Daily Mail
reported on the recent arrest of seven members of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party, a
revolutionary Maoist group, after a rioting spree that caused at least $100,000 in damages.
Every one of them appears to be white from their mugshots , and among them are an art director
who has done work for Pepsi and Samsung, a model and actress, and the son of famous comic book
writers. The New York Post profiled one
rioter, twenty-year-old Clara Kraebber, and discovered that her mother runs her own
architecture firm and her father is a psychiatrist who teaches at Columbia University. The
family paid $1.8 million in 2016 for their New York City apartment and also own a home in
Connecticut with four fireplaces.
Or consider Vicky Osterweil, the white author of the much-discussed book In Defense of
Looting , who is also the daughter of a college professor. As Matt Taibbi reports in his review of the
book, "there's little evidence the author of In Defense of Looting has ever been outside" and
"she confesses to a 'personal aversion to violence,' lamenting a 'refusal to attack property'
that 'does not lessen the degree to which I benefit from systems of domination.'" In Taibbi's
words "this is a 288-page book written by a Very Online Person in support of the idea that
other people should loot, riot, and burn things in the real world."
Rioting by the affluent is not limited to white people either. Consider the
case of the two nonwhite attorneys, one of whom received his law degree at Princeton, whose
arrest for throwing a molotov cocktail at a riot in New York City made the headlines precisely
because of their high-status, well-paying jobs.
What all of these examples have in common is that the rioting and destruction, or advocacy
for the same, is being perpetrated by people who have no skin in the game and will not be
exposed to the long-term consequences for the people and communities that they are ostensibly
trying to help. Neighborhoods that suffer through riots often
end up economically depressed for decades to come, but people like Clara Kraebber will not
have to worry about such things.
In the last century, there has been a great deal of scholarship attempting to discover the
roots of these kinds of widespread revolutionary movements. In Liberalism , Mises discusses the
idea of a Fourier complex, where antiliberal revolutionary ideas are adopted by people as a
means of dealing with their own inadequacy in the face of reality. Political theorist Eric
Voegelin (who attended Mises's Vienna seminars) also posits a similar, though more complex,
explanation with his theory of gnosticism.
The classically liberal sociologist Helmut Schoeck also makes a similar argument in his book
Envy . Envy, Schoeck
argues, stems from an individual's reaction to a personal inadequacy and a desire to find a way
to shift the blame to anyone or anything other than himself. Like Mises and Voegelin, Schoeck
explores the ways in which this attitude is detrimental to society, but he also explores why
some people engaged in revolutionary movements are themselves well off and not members of the
toiling masses they seek to "liberate."
In these cases Schoeck argues that such people are not afflicted with envy, but rather with
a fear of envy or the guilt of being unequal. He argues that "the guilt-tinged fear of being
thought unequal is very deeply ingrained in the human psyche," and that it can be observed
everywhere from offices to schools in the way in which people who excel at something will
consciously or unconsciously lower their performance. This phenomenon is unfortunate enough
when it comes to the workplace, but when it comes to politics the consequences can be much more
serious.
Schoeck argues that such guilt may lead a person to forgo their old life in order to serve
the less fortunate but that many times such a person does not seek to extirpate their guilt by
leaving their own comfortable station, but rather by insisting that the entire world must join
them in eradicating inequality. In his words "I have no doubt that one of the most important
motives for joining an egalitarian political movement is this anxious sense of guilt: 'Let us
set up a society where no one is envious.'"
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No doubt even Schoeck would be impressed by the degree to which our current upheavals are
driven by those wracked with the guilt of being unequal rather than those filled with envy
itself. To be sure, there is no shortage of such envious people running around these days, but
there can be no doubt about which group is the driving force.
Hopefully, as social life slowly returns to normal and as the weather gets colder, the
guilt-ridden rich kids will tire out from playacting as revolutionaries and return home. But
until then, it seems that the rest of us will be forced to suffer as they work out their
psychological problems through some window-smashing therapy.
DEDA CVETKO , 2 hours ago
Just a friendly reminder to the author of the article:
Some of the most vicious and violent revolutionaries throughout human history were the
scions of aristocracy or descendants of extremely rich and affluent families: Jean-Paul
Marat, Girolamo Savonarola, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Simon Bolivar, Fidel Castro, Sun Yat-Sen,
Che Guevara, Louis Auguste Blanqui, Oliver Cromwell, Friedrich Engels, etc, etc....all
either came from the very rich family background or descended from the blue-bloods and
nobility. Mao Zedong's father was one of the richest farmers in all of China, just as
Trotsky's dad was one of the richest farmers in Russian Ukraine. Mohandas Gandhi was a
brahmin. Count Mirabeau was a, well...count. Ataturk's father was one of the richest people
in Salonica, Greece. Louis Philippe II - who sided with Robespierre - was of the royal
blood, the first cousin of Louis XVI whose trial and execution he personally endorsed and
supported. And, oh....lest I forget...Nelson Mandela was no slouch in the class pedigree
department, either.
I could go on forever and ever.
In fact, impoverished and pauperized revolutionaries were always but a tiny subset of
the revolutionary class. People like Stalin, Gramsci or Tito were always an aberrant group,
an exception to the general rule.
One can probably write a very thick tome about the rich and aristocratic abandoning
their social stratus in order to side with the dispossessed and disenfranchised. This is
far from being a new and heretofore unknown phenomenon.
I am leaving it to the historians and political psychologists to explain why this is so.
Personally, I think that the inherent cynicism and hypocrisy of their own families is a
perfectly good reason to switch sides. Another possible reason is that the poor and hungry
people are typically too busy surviving and feeding themselves to be organizing violent
overthrow of the ruling class.
truth hound , 1 hour ago
They are knowingly in on the psyop. By DECEPTION, though shalt do war.
DEDA CVETKO , 1 hour ago
Possibly some but definitely not all. It would require a much more detailed
psychological profile to figure out what went on in these people's heads. I myself am just
visiting this cluster**** of galaxies, what the fvck do I know about how and why the humans
behave?
Blue_Rock , 1 hour ago
A very good post. I will add anger and rebellion by the youths. The realization that
they somehow don't measure up and that they might not be able to use that gender studies
lesbian basket weaving diploma to get ahead. I have personally seen more than one inherited
fortune lost and business run into the ground by spoiled entitled heirs.
DEDA CVETKO , 1 hour ago
I have personally seen more than one inherited fortune lost and business run into the
ground by spoiled entitled heirs.
This is the Law of Entropy on display: each subsequent iteration is only a paler and
paler version of the preceding one. This is why the caste and class-based societies can't
endure forever: the forces and ideas that guide them simply aren't genetically suited to
perpetuate themselves in their original, integral form. Sooner or later, the integrity of
the founding father(s) dissipates into degeneration and devolution.
algol_dog , 2 hours ago
An interesting note to history. The initiators of these movements are the first to go
once the new regime takes over. Once the new leaders get in charge they realize the danger
of having them around and quickly dispense with them. Examples being the Stalin purges and
Hitler's breaking of the SA.
Utopia Planitia , 2 hours ago
"What's With The Rich-Kid Revolutionaries?"
Safe spaces, exclusively female teachers, participation trophies, no siblings (nobody to
kick you in the face growing up when you are being an asswipe), never a harsh word, no
discipline, constantly being told you are "special", etc. etc. That's just a start.
not dead yet , 1 hour ago
Long before there were the things you mentioned there were rich kids doing rioting and
looting. Back in the sixties it was rich kids made to feel guilty about being rich by their
commie professors. Came from good families with a decent upbringing gone bad by propaganda.
Same kids would go home during breaks and argue with their families how they made their
money off the backs of the workers. Typical commie stuff. Unlike today back then they made
bombs and blew stuff up killing people with many of the bomb makers rich kids. Robberies
for the cause. The parents of the slimy San Francisco DA are serving life for killing a
guard while robbing an armored car. Idiot was then raised by Bill Ayers after his parents
were arrested.
motley331 , 3 hours ago
ALL of these people are useful idiots for the likes of Soros...
truthseeker47 , 1 hour ago
Leader of the violent Weather Underground and self-described communist revolutionary
Bill Ayers came from a very upper class suburban Chicago family.
Ignant Bastad , 1 hour ago
neglected and unloved as a child, so he spends his life "getting back at" his parents?
just a guess.
PGR88 , 2 hours ago
More importantly, those rich white kids out there burning 7-11s downtown are displaying
yet more entitlement. They've never faced consequences their whole life. Imagine if some
counter-protestor swung a bat at them, or small businessman defending his property shot
them? It would be an quick education in consequences.
play_arrow
Arctic_Fox , 1 hour ago
When they don't get shot, it's another manifestation of their white-assed privilege.
Plus, Progressive mayors tell the cops not to play hardball with the rioters, and even
if a few get busted the Soros-backed DA drops charges. Then if it does go to court, some
faculty lounge kook is on the bench as judge, and there are OJ juries to nullify the
prosecution... so they walk.
Privilege from start to finish...
Kind of makes you wonder why we even bother with this government-thing.
hoffstetter , 2 hours ago
People learn from their friends. I know tech millionaires that don't have a clue about
what's going on outside their own circle jerk echo chamber of "friends" that repeat leftist
talking points as if they were Catholics reciting the rosary. Occasionally, I get one to
admit that the stuff they're spouting is completely unsupported after tossing them a few
videos or transcripts that contradict what they thought was reality, but they just find
something else to which they can redirect that is completely unsupported and irrefutable as
it's nonexistent. These aren't kids. They've been around for decades but never left their
cubicles or their monitors and were extremely competent in their jobs, so now they think
they know everything because they knew one thing. It's extremely common.
hmmmm , 2 hours ago
Maslow's hierarchy of needs explains why a disproportionate amount of shallow thinking
rich kids are involved in such causes. Regular folks are not focused on self
actualization.
charlie_don't_surf , 2 hours ago
They are unaccomplished jealous little a-holes that can only tear down others to pretend
to elevate themselves.
Why123 , 2 hours ago
Alexis De Tocqueville analyzed the United States in the early 19th century, before
Germany was a country under the Kaisers. He predicted that the United States and Russia
would be the world's superpowers in the 20th century. With respect to the United States, he
predicted that we would be a preeminent superpower because 1) we didn't have permanent
concentrations of wealth (for example, if a rich guy had six kids, his plantation would be
evenly distributed in at least two generations) and 2) we focused exclusively on practical
education, not the theoretical ******** that dominated European academia, and which could
only benefit the aristocracy and absurdly intelligent proles (think Euclid or Gauss). With
respect to both Russia and the United States, he saw that both populations had the capacity
to sacrifice and overcome adversity (although different types of adversity). Those
advantages have been eviscerated. We don't focus on practical education. We have permanent,
feudal levels, of wealth, and the population has no will to sacrifice. The university
system and institutionalization of the United States was fundamental towards achieving
those aims.
It comes down to the needs of every human being, rich or poor, to feel achievement and
the specific needs of the rich. These kids have real money because they own assets that
replicate more money, without work. I won't get into tax, trade and immigration policies
that take an already advantageous position enjoyed by these pricks to the next level of
oligarchy. But that isn't enough. You have to impose your value system and "skills" as the
objective value system. You see, these kids want the advantage of the wealth, but they want
to demolish the path to achieving wealth by others. The university system has to be the
ONLY functioning economic path. What would happen if kids knew from a young age that the
name of the game is to save and acquire asserts, and all other pursuits are meaningless? Do
you think we would have a student loan problem? Do you think we would have an inequality
problem? The answer is a resounding "no." The education system is designed to destroy. It
blinds you to this indisputable truth. There are people who see through the BS though (more
on this later). As long as there is some freedom, these problem will rise up the dominance
hierarchy. These rich kids don't like that. These rich kids and their academic professors
deeply resent that. This is why they have to tear down the system. Their privilege will be
preserved, but the rest of the population will be enslaved. If they have their way, every
single young person in the United Stares will have the "benefit" of attending university
and having a "fulfilling career." Well have people in school until their thirties, learning
useless crap, and in permanent debt bondage. This cements the rich kids' status,
Anecdotally, I was speaking to friends from high school. Most of us are professionals.
Some work in law enforcement, some work as engineers, some as lawyers, a few unionized
tradespeople and one doctor. The unionized trades people blow all of us out of the water,
but that's not the startling thing. One of our friends went straight to work at 16. He's
not even a real "tradesman." His father, mother, three sister and himself worked three jobs
and saved aggressively. They bought a first multifamily in 2005. They now have 70
buildings. The first building, as my one friend put it, "caused a snowballs effect." That's
the American way. That's the American dream. The American dream is not going to school
until you are in your fu**** late twenties or mid thirties to go churn and burn on a W-2.
For the prick with an inheritance, that may be useful because he or she has wealth, and he
or she can, especially in light of Boomer cultural norms, pretend that the source of wealth
is the education, but deep inside they know the truth, and they resent the system because
it still allows it and a small number of people manage to rise as a result. These people
are at the top of the food chain. This offends these rich university assholes.
I chuckled when my friend who works for Homeland Security (Democrat) and my friend who
works as an engineer for the Defense Industry (Republican) both stated "why didn't they
teach us that in school?" Rofl. The point of the schools is that so you don't know the
source of success. The point of school is to cement the rich kids advantage and destroy
you. This causes a dual resentment: the poor kids feel resentment because they see they
were sold a bag of goods and the rich kid feels resentment because he or she can't pretend
the success is self induced.
I'll leave everyone with this: Donald Trump was called a racist, rapist, crook, liar,
etc by Clinton in the 2016 campaign. That didn't bother him. The only thing that got him
angry, ever, was when Clinton said he inherited money, which was the only thing that was
true.
Dying-Of-The-Light , 2 hours ago
Kind of ironic that you have the thick-as-shxt, criminal end of blacks who want lots of
bling without working for it, marching with middle class whites who have all the toys these
blacks want. A real match made in hell. The sooner these black and white retards are given
long prison sentences the better.
createnewaccount , 2 hours ago
Ironic? Maybe for the moment but watch this space, I expect the old Minsky quote also
applies to the body politic.
" stability breeds instability "
-Hyman Minsky
Eastern Whale , 2 hours ago
The US government especially Trump, Pompeo and Nancy Pelosi seem to like the "peaceful"
violence in Hong Kong. Nancy Pelosi even coined it a ""a beautiful sight to behold".
What goes around comes around, beware of what you are promoting overseas. Violence and
War all in the name of WMD, Democracy and National Security.
Herodotus , 3 hours ago
Same thing was going on in 1968.
Also, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were rich kid revolutionaries.
fackbankz , 3 hours ago
George Washington was not from a particularly rich family. Jefferson was though.
Jack's Raging Bile Duct , 1 hour ago
It's pretty simple. Rich kids are idle, don't understand the value of anything, and
commonly lazy. This is fertile ground for half-baked ideologies that run h
awesomepic4u , 3 hours ago
Revolutionary leftism is
contemporary Western society's operating definition of nobility and heroism. Social elites
have always justified themselves as being the people who fully live up to the ideal, and
their young men in particular are supposed to earn their aristocratic honors by being the
ones who run towards both good and evil rather than shrinking from them. Violence gets
justified as being the ultimate test of personal commitment to an ideal, and it's a short
road from there to arguing that violence must therefore be virtuous in itself.
If these kids feel guilty of anything, they feel guilty of sitting in classrooms and
offices rather than exercising their powers to the fullest. A moral crusade with lots of
opportunities for adrenaline-soaked adventure is an irresistible temptation.
Cheap Chinese Crap , 1 hour ago
I forget the exact context but I remember the story about an American couple who
wondered if they should send their kids to an American or British university.
"That depends," their British friend replied,"on whether you want them back as radicals
or homosexuals."
Now you get both.
sbin , 2 hours ago
Would be fun to move those BLM white tards to the real black neighborhoods.
Would produce a lot of racists.
My black friends do not want to live in a black majority neighborhood.
y_arrow
stinkypinky , 3 hours ago
Abused and angry children, lashing out at "the system" around them, being used by true
revolutionaries (Marxists). The abuse angle is key - they want all vestiges of "the power
structure" around them to be torn down, to get back at it all. Racism doesn't matter,
sexism doesn't matter, none of these causes are actually cared about one iota. They would
riot because it's Tuesday and 60 degrees outside as long as someone had a bullhorn, an
umbrella and a brick. It certainly helps that racism is a thought crime you can accuse
ANYONE OF, and it's been so loaded with meaning that it's a devastating attack of character
which can't be defended against.
Bottom line: to understand why these rich kids are rioting look to how they've been
abused.
4Y_LURKER , 2 hours ago
Yeah they are in reality human shields for the corporate apparently communist coup which
is ongoing.
1Y4NixfGQ4MbMO4f , 3 hours ago
I think they are called "Useful idiots" or more descriptive would be "Disposable
Idiots"
GRDguy , 29 seconds ago
Another generation of sociopaths, born to and indoctrined by sociopathic parents.
"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime," and a great number of victims.
smacker , 9 minutes ago
I believe there's a long history of rich kids being involved in revolutionary
conduct.
They are invariably brought up in the shadow of dominating strict rich white parents and
get to
an age where they want to cut out their own slice of life to establish themselves as
independent
individuals, not clones. Adopting political extremes and crime is an easy way to do
that.
Angular Momentum , 48 minutes ago
The industrial revolution has made life safe bland and comfortable for the middle class.
It's easy to be moral when life is easy. In rough dangerous times and places living a life
of integrity was a challenge and those who did it earned respect. But how can you be a hero
in Suburbia? By heroically challenging common sense. The stupider the cause the harder it
is to accept its ideas and thus the more heroic.
fcd443 , 58 minutes ago
Because these dipsh!ts didn't create their own wealth and they feel bad for all of their
parents/generational wealth. They don't know the first thing when it comes to creating
something and coming from nothing.
They want to feel as relevant as their priors so they do what they know best, throw a
tantrum. In this case, it's called a peaceful protest aka black lives matter.
LeftandRightareWrong , 1 hour ago
Many people just want to be relevant. Why do sites like Facebook work?
Psychological, psychiatric pandemic in full force.
darkstar7646 , 2 hours ago
Couple of ideas:
They know the game is over and that they will "fail" to live up to the legacy of
their parents, costing their families everything in the process (which see the scam
college-admissions scandals).
They are trying to provoke a reaction among the White Right Militias ( agent
provocateurs ).
They feel they can get away with anything and are actually acti
Linda Hand , 3 hours ago
The education system is infested with communists.
DancingDragon , 3 hours ago
You mean the democrat party and their MSM sycophants
The
Russian President Vladimir Putin disclosed in a
TV
interview
on August 27 that the Americans, amongst others, had fuelled the unrest in Belarus. He explained that the
controversial presence of 33 Russian nationals (with military background) in Minsk in the run-up to the presidential election
in Belarus on August 8, which briefly
created
misunderstanding
between Minsk and with Moscow, was itself was a joint operation by Ukrainian and US intelligence
agencies.
The
Russian nationals were apparently given job offers and were "simply lured there (Minsk), dragged across the border de facto
they were brought in on fake documents." Evidently, Russia is in possession of hard intelligence.
Putin spoke up even as US Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun wrapped up talks with top Russian officials in Moscow
Wednesday. According to a
VOA
report
, Biegun's consultations "marked an intensifying U.S. effort to find a peaceful solution in Belarus." The report
took note that en route to Moscow, Biegun had "signalled that Washington was not eager to accept efforts by [Belarus President
Alexander] Lukashenko to cast the election standoff as an East versus West showdown that might trigger direct Russian
involvement."
Simply put, Biegun was on a "damage control" mission. This can be taken as admission of defeat in the US-backed regime change
project in Belarus. Conceivably, Russian officials shared with Biegun their intelligence regarding the CIA involvement. Later,
crisply anodyne
identical
readouts
were released by the Russian and American sides without divulging any details.
The
CIA would roll back its Belarus operation -- for the time being, at least. A commentary titled
What's
Next for the Peaceful Uprising in Belarus?
by the United States Institute of Peace sees "potential to bring change" in
Belarus, but concludes saying, "While there are no guarantees of success, there is cause for hope. At a minimum, Belarusians
have gained a new-found sense of dignity and belief in the power of nonviolent collective action."
Women
protestors in Minsk, Belarus, lionised by Western media
This appears to have been a well-planned operation. Under the garb of journalists, western intelligence deployed dozens of
special agents in Belarus. Lukashenko has ordered their expulsion. Associated Press, Radio Liberty and BBC "reporters" have
had their accreditation cancelled.
A Swedish "photo
journalist", presumably an intelligence operative, was detained and was released at the personal intervention of the
Swedish
ambassador to Belarus and flown out of Minsk.
From the pro forma reaction by the European Union so far, Brussels has a fair idea of what really happened -- that there
has been a US operation with active participation of Poland and Lithuania (both EU countries) and Ukraine. Unsurprisingly,
NATO
statements
have been rather combative.
The NATO also
began air exercises in Poland and Lithuania coinciding with the unrest in Belarus.
However, major European powers -- Germany, France, Italy -- didn't want to get entangled. Their top leaders telephoned Putin
to ease the tensions. The EU initially proposed OSCE as mediator, but Moscow sensed that it might lead to backdoor entry by
the US intelligence. The OSCE is manned by NATO powers and is under American thumb.
The
clincher has been the stern warning by the Kremlin that if the western operation continued, Russia will be left with no option
but to intervene. The warning came at Putin's level, making it very clear that Russia will not countenance a regime change in
Minsk to hijack Belarus into the American camp. Moscow has asserted its special interests in Belarus under international law.
In his TV interview on Thursday, Putin emphatically stated:
Who
are the protestors in Belarus who make the anti-police violent provocations?
"Indeed, the Union Treaty and the Collective Security Treaty (CSTO) include articles saying that all member states of these
organisations, including the Union State, which consists of two states only – Russia and Belarus, are obliged to help each
other protect their sovereignty, external borders and stability In this connection, we have certain obligations towards
Belarus, and this is how Mr Lukashenko has formulated his question. He said that he would like us to provide assistance to him
if this should become necessary. I replied that Russia would honour all its obligations.
"Mr
Lukashenko has asked me to create a reserve group of law enforcement personnel, and I have done this. But we have also agreed
that this group would not be used unless the situation becomes uncontrollable we came to the conclusion that now it is not
necessary, and I hope that it will never be necessary to use this reserve, which is why we are not using it." Putin made it
abundantly clear that Moscow stands by Lukashenko."
"Nonviolent
protestors" in Belarus
The events in Belarus constitute a watershed moment. Russia will not allow another Ukraine-type colour revolution in the
"near abroad", aimed at encircling it with hostile governments. But Moscow's intervention, if at all, will conform to
international law and stem out of invitation by the country concerned.
That is to say, Russia regards it to be the prerogative of the CSTO countries to handle their internal affairs without outside
unlawful interference. Having said that, Moscow has invoked the CSTO's collective security doctrine. This sets a precedent.
The CSTO comprises Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan. A CIA-sponsored regime change project in
any of these countries can run into the CSTO's crosshairs. Considering that the CSTO is de facto led from Moscow, any more
regime change project in Central Asia or Caucasus will trigger Russian countermeasures.
Most important, Moscow will not be prescriptive. Putin has supported Lukashenka's proposal to draft a new constitution and
hold fresh presidential and parliamentary elections, but transition should be lawful and orderly. This Russian approach has
been already evident in Kyrgyzstan (2005) Turkmenistan (2006), and Uzbekistan (2016). Even in the case of Georgia (2003) and
Ukraine (2004 and 2014), Russia didn't oppose
transitions
but the West turned them into geopolitical contestations to instal anti-Russian regimes.
However, a caveat must be added. Putin also underscored that Belarus is a very special case. He said, in a clear reference
to the US, "some forces would like to see something different happening there (Belarus). They would like to influence these
processes and to bring about the solutions that would suit their political interests." Russia cannot afford to see such
nefarious designs succeed in Belarus.
In Putin's words, "This nation is very close to us (Russian Federation) and perhaps is the closest, both in terms
of ethnic proximity, the language, the culture, the spiritual as well as other aspects. We have dozens or probably hundreds
of thousands, if not millions, of direct family ties with Belarus." Not only that, Russia sources from Belarus almost 90
percent of its imports of agricultural products.
"... The blogger Caitlin Johnstone accurately states that these most of these mainstream corporate journalists are really *narrative managers* in that their primary role is to peddle the official narrative of the US corporate/political establishment for any given topic. ..."
"... I would add that the managing editors of these "journalists"/narrative managers would be more honestly described as "handlers," to use the parlance of spooks. ..."
"... Waste of time. They control the media. The Internet may have lots of influence, but it still does not set "consensus reality" - that remains with the MSM. The MSM issues one coordinated narrative. The Internet is all over the place. Without one coordinated narrative, you can't set "reality". ..."
"... In addition, those who issue the narrative and control the MSM have the power. People want to believe those in power, due to cognitive dissonance - otherwise they'd have to accept that everyone ruling their lives is a corrupt liar. The electorate may *say* they understand that their rulers are corrupt - but they can't act* on that realization without compromising their own internal belief systems. So again, waste of time to try ..."
snake , Sep 22 2020 0:59 utc | 22 can we not invent a method that can counter this tactic of using propaganda to control
the narrative?
1) Hack them. Release their planning documents, emails, phone calls, etc. showing how the scam was set up.
2) Waste of time. They control the media. The Internet may have lots of influence, but it still does not set "consensus reality"
- that remains with the MSM. The MSM issues one coordinated narrative. The Internet is all over the place. Without one coordinated
narrative, you can't set "reality".
3) In addition, those who issue the narrative and control the MSM have the power. People want to believe those in power, due to
cognitive dissonance - otherwise they'd have to accept that everyone ruling their lives is a corrupt liar. The electorate may *say*
they understand that their rulers are corrupt - but they can't act* on that realization without compromising their own internal belief
systems. So again, waste of time to try.
Well....as always, and especially if it involves anything even remotely relating to 'Russia', or Iran, or whatever adversarial
operational target of the day might be -- one can reliably count on our very own "Izvestia on the Hudson" to faithfully execute
their officially sanctioned nation security state propaganda mission by dutifully steno-graphing as much dis/mis-information as
their NSA/CIA/Pentagon handlers request (require) from them.
It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper's movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic
was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called
"the narrative." We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with
editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.
Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the
mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting
National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: "My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?"
The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper's daily Page One meeting:
"We set the agenda for the country in that room.
The blogger Caitlin Johnstone accurately states that these most of these mainstream corporate journalists are really *narrative
managers* in that their primary role is to peddle the official narrative of the US corporate/political establishment for any given
topic.
I would add that the managing editors of these "journalists"/narrative managers would be more honestly described as "handlers,"
to use the parlance of spooks.
In fact, it would be apt to described venerable institution of journalism itself as an intelligence operation.
@snake | Sep 22 2020 0:59 utc | 22 can we not invent a method that can counter this tactic of using propaganda to control the
narrative?
1) Hack them. Release their planning documents, emails, phone calls, etc. showing how the scam was set up.
2) Waste of time. They control the media. The Internet may have lots of influence, but it still does not set "consensus
reality" - that remains with the MSM. The MSM issues one coordinated narrative. The Internet is all over the place. Without one
coordinated narrative, you can't set "reality".
3) In addition, those who issue the narrative and control the MSM have the power. People want to believe those in power,
due to cognitive dissonance - otherwise they'd have to accept that everyone ruling their lives is a corrupt liar. The electorate
may *say* they understand that their rulers are corrupt - but they can't act* on that realization without compromising their own
internal belief systems. So again, waste of time to try.
It would be interesting if Durham prove result revealed in October, not matter how
whitewashed they are.
From comments below it is lear that for this particular subset neoliberal elite lost all
legitimacy
Notable quotes:
"... Told to Erase Laptop Containing Investigation of Anthony Weiner Laptop ..."
"... Robertson alleges that the FBI did nothing for a month after discovering Clinton's emails on the Anthony Weiner laptop. It was only after he spoke with the U.S. Attorney's office overseeing the case, he claims, that the agency took action. ..."
"... Robertson's assertions match up with a Wall Street Journal report from 2018 . In that report, text messages between agent Peter Strzok and his girlfriend, lawyer Lisa Page, indicated the former had been called to discuss the newly discovered emails on September 28th. Those emails wouldn't be revealed until former Director James Comey notified Congress about them on October 28th. ..."
"... A book written by James B . Stewart in 2019 asserts that FBI agents had referred to the discovery of Hillary Clinton's emails as an "oh s***" moment." One agent admitted there were "ten times" as many emails as Comey admitted to publicly. ..."
"... These allegations make it difficult to say Comey did not lie to the public – if not Congress . ..."
"... Recently released documents from the DOJ show multiple FBI officials had "accidentally wiped" their phones after the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) requested them . ..."
"... Erasing evidence is a consistent theme for the Obama-era FBI. Meanwhile, the Senate Homeland Security Committee has voted to authorize over three dozen subpoenas and depositions of some of these officials, including Comey. ..."
"... The difficulty is not just that Comey and his underlings were obstructing justice to benefit Clinton, and made a total **** show of it. It is that Sessions was, "to protect the DOJ"... and Barr, also, clearly, as long he continues to run interference for Comey, Clinton, et al, is also obstructing justice. Barr has crafted a veneer, it seems... in the Durham probe... to provide himself plausible deniability. That veneer can remain plausible only as long as Durham does nothing, and fails to make the files public. ..."
"... It was the NYPD. And, that cadre of NYPD officers recognized what was likely to happen when they did turn it over to the FBI. So they made copies. And, the copies got distributed to the cloud. ..."
"... The emails are in the stellarwind database , according to William Binney. So are all the texts that the Mueller crew "erased." IntercoursetheEU is correct - every email and text ever sent is archived in that database. ..."
"... Where is that slimy, former CIA Director who wouldn't shut-up on national TV from late 2016 to early 2020? Hhmm, not a freaking peep nor have I seen any recent images. How about the dirtball, prior FBI Dir? His Twitter acct has only had "quotes" posted for about a month now. ..."
"... Clapper? Another Trump trasher on constant TV the last few years.....where is he? NOT A PEEP. Why wouldn't he keep trashing to diminish DJT's election chances? ..."
"... Brennan was on an MSNBC panel last week pale, sweating, moving around in his seat at the mere mention of John Durham. Not his usual cocky self that's for sure. ..."
FBI agent John Robertson, the man who found Hillary Clinton's emails on the laptop of
Anthony Weiner, claims he was advised by bosses to
erase his own computer.
Former FBI Director James Comey, you may recall, announced days before the 2016 presidential
election that he had "learned of the existence" of the emails on Weiner's laptop .
Weiner is the disgraced husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
Robertson alleges that the manner in which his higher-ups in the FBI handled the case was
"not ethically or morally right."
His startling claims are made in a book titled, "October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save
Itself and Crashed an Election," an excerpt of which has been published by the
Washington Post .
Told to Erase Laptop Containing Investigation of Anthony Weiner Laptop
Robertson alleges that the FBI did nothing for a month after discovering Clinton's emails on
the Anthony Weiner laptop. It was only after he spoke with the U.S. Attorney's office overseeing the case, he claims,
that the agency took action.
"He had told his bosses about the Clinton emails weeks ago," the book contends . "Nothing
had happened."
"Or rather, the only thing that had happened was his boss had instructed Robertson to
erase his computer work station."
This, according to the Post report, was to "ensure there was no classified material on it,"
but also would eliminate any trail of his actions taken during the investigation.
FBI Did Nothing About Hillary Clinton's Emails For Months?
Robertson's assertions match up with a Wall Street Journal
report from 2018 . In that report, text messages between agent Peter Strzok and his girlfriend, lawyer Lisa
Page, indicated the former had been called to discuss the newly discovered emails on September
28th. Those emails wouldn't be revealed until former Director James Comey notified Congress about
them on October 28th.
A book written by James B . Stewart in 2019 asserts that FBI agents had referred to the
discovery of Hillary Clinton's emails as an "oh s***" moment." One agent admitted there were "ten times" as many emails as Comey admitted to publicly.
These allegations make it difficult to say Comey did not lie to the public – if not
Congress .
Robertson's story is being revealed as U.S. Attorney John Durham is investigating the FBI's
role in the origins of the Russia probe into President Trump's campaign.
Recently released documents from the DOJ show multiple FBI officials had "accidentally
wiped" their phones after the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) requested them .
Erasing evidence is a consistent theme for the Obama-era FBI. Meanwhile, the Senate Homeland Security Committee has voted to authorize over three dozen
subpoenas and depositions of some of these officials, including Comey.
Democrats seem skittish about what Durham is uncovering .
Four House committee chairs last week
asked for an "emergency" review of Attorney General William Barr's handling of Durham's
probe.
"We are concerned by indications that Attorney General Barr might depart from longstanding
DOJ principles," a letter to the IG reads .
They contend Barr may "take public action related to U.S. Attorney Durham's investigation
that could impact the presidential election." Top Democrats have also been threatening to impeach Barr over the investigation.
Kevin Clinesmith, one of the FBI officials involved in gathering evidence in the Russia
investigation, pled
guilty last month to making a false statement. He was accused by the Inspector General of altering an email about former Trump campaign
adviser Carter Page.
President Trump's Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, said in July that he expects further
indictments and jail time to come out of Durham's probe. Democrats, Comey, and others at the FBI might be a little nervous.
DaiRR , 12 hours ago
DemoRat operatives still pervade the DOJ and to a lesser extent the FBI. Treasonous F's
all of them. Andrew Weissmann is an evil a Rat as any of them and he should be tried,
disbarred and punished for all his lying and despicable crimes while at the DOJ. Of course
MSNBC now loves paying him to be their "legal analyst".
MissCellany , 13 hours ago
What, like with a cloth or something?
RoadKill4Supper , 12 hours ago
"What difference, at this point, does it make?"
FBGnome , 3 hours ago
The current election would be at stake.
Unknown User , 14 hours ago
Unless the Swamp does it. Not just a post or a website disappear, people disappear.
Sense , 13 hours ago
The difficulty is not just that Comey and his underlings were obstructing justice to
benefit Clinton, and made a total **** show of it. It is that Sessions was, "to protect the
DOJ"... and Barr, also, clearly, as long he continues to run interference for Comey,
Clinton, et al, is also obstructing justice. Barr has crafted a veneer, it seems... in the
Durham probe... to provide himself plausible deniability. That veneer can remain plausible
only as long as Durham does nothing, and fails to make the files public.
Only if Durham proceeds to use the files, and/or makes the files public, will we find
out if we get prosecutions, or if we get more obstruction under Barr's watch. So, Barr is
carrying a pretty big hammer. It isn't at all clear what he intends to do with that hammer,
or how he intends to use it if he does.
A wild card, perhaps, in the potential for an Senate or House investigation including
Barr's forced participation... in response to which he might be compelled to answer the
unasked question ? Makes it kind of hard to see how "investigating Barr"... poses a threat
to Barr, or Trump... rather than a threat to those investigating him ? The fact they're
even twittering about it suggests more than awareness about the content of that
information... and thus maybe complicity in the effort to cover it up ?
That would explain most of the events of the last four years.
And, as a note, it wasn't "the FBI" that "found the e-mails" (and other files) on the
Weiner laptop.
It was the NYPD. And, that cadre of NYPD officers recognized what was likely to happen
when they did turn it over to the FBI. So they made copies. And, the copies got distributed to the cloud.
It is not possible, I'd think, that Julian Assange didn't get a copy... in case you
wonder why Barr's DOJ is still prosecuting journalism. I doubt they're doing that because
of past publication... rather than in an effort to prevent future publication. Because Assange... in all likelihood... might be the only journalist left in the
world... who will not be coerced into withholding publication.
ElmerTwitch , 12 hours ago
The emails are in the stellarwind database , according to William Binney. So are all the texts that the Mueller crew "erased." IntercoursetheEU is correct - every email and text ever sent is archived in that
database.
The DOJ is indeed protecting Obama, Hillary, Comey, Brennan, Clapper et al.
by claiming "the emails are gone! The texts are gone, too!"
sparky139 , 12 hours ago
What is the stellarwind database
TheReplacement's Replacement , 1 hour ago
Look up NSA.
takeaction , 15 hours ago
As all of us here on ZH understand. NOTHING WILL EVER HAPPEN... And Trump Team....if you are reading this... THIS IS THE BIGGEST LET DOWN OF YOUR ENTIRE PRESIDENCY...
No_Pretzel_Logic , 14 hours ago
takeaction - I disagree. I think things are happening right now....out of the
country.
TRIALS.....
Where is that slimy, former CIA Director who wouldn't shut-up on national TV from late
2016 to early 2020? Hhmm, not a freaking peep nor have I seen any recent images. How about
the dirtball, prior FBI Dir? His Twitter acct has only had "quotes" posted for about a
month now.
Clapper? Another Trump trasher on constant TV the last few years.....where is he? NOT A
PEEP. Why wouldn't he keep trashing to diminish DJT's election chances?
I'm telling ya, I think they are on a certain Caribbean Island. And my wager is that
Trump is going to toss a wild curveball into this election about the 3rd week of Oct.
Treason convictions announced, is my bet.
maggie2now , 13 hours ago
Brennan was on an MSNBC panel last week pale, sweating, moving around in his seat at the
mere mention of John Durham. Not his usual cocky self that's for sure. HRC was online
flapping her yap with Jennifer Palmieri not too long ago trying to convince the Biden
campaign not to concede the 2020 election under any circumstances. As for Clapper, I don't
know - maybe hiding in a remote location ****ting himself?
MoreFreedom , 12 hours ago
They've shut up because their actions betray them. Publicly they say Trump is a Russian
spy or puppet, while under oath, in a closed room, representing their former government
position and top secret clearance, they've no information to support it. That shows an
anti-Trump political motivation, regarding their prior actions in government. It's also
defrauding the public and government.
YouJustCouldnt , 2 hours ago
Couldn't agree more. How many times have we been here before!
20 years on from 9/11 - From the thousands of experts on the Architects and Engineers
for 9/11 Truth , the latest news is that The National Institute of Standards and Technology
( NIST ) is now more than a week late in issuing its "initial decision" on the pending
"request for correction" to its 2008 report on the collapse of World Trade Center Building
7. Big Whoop - and just another nothing burger.
Ms No , 15 hours ago
Uhhhh.....yeah.
We have seen this type of thing since JFK. If you hadn't long ago figured this out then
you are either an amateur or a paid internet herd-moving troll/anti-human.
Some of us aren't part of the herd.
(((Anthony Weiner))), just like (((Mossad Epstein honeypot))) and (((lucky Larry
Silverstein))), countless other examples that blow statistical likelihood way beyond
coincidence.
Not rocket science. Its a mob and these are their puppets and fronts. They dont just own
the FBI. They own all branches of your government and all the alphabets.
Enjoying the covid hysteria and run-up to WWIII?
Unknown User , 14 hours ago
If by (((they))) you mean the British who created the OSA and then the CIA. They also
created all the think-tanks, like the CFR. They own the Fed and run the worldwide banking
cartel. The British Crown owns all the countries of the Commonwealth. And they started the
COVID-19 delusion. Yes. Make no mistake. It is (((THEY))).
VWAndy , 15 hours ago
An he didnt go public with it either.
occams razor. they are all corrupt.
Stackers , 15 hours ago
Anyone who thinks that anybody beyond this low level flunky, Kliensmith, is going to get
any kind of prosecution is dreaming. None of these people will face any consequences to
their outright sedition and they know it. Disgusting.
radical-extremist , 15 hours ago
She created a private personal server to purposely circumvent the FOIA system and any
other prying eyes. Her staff was warned not to do it, but they refused to confront her
about it. They were so technically inept that they didn't understand emails are copied on
to servers everywhere...including the pentagon and the state department. And Huma's laptop
that her perv husband used to sext girls.
She maintained and exchanged Top Secret information on a personal/private/unsecured
server in her house. That is a crime punishable with prison time...and yet she skates.
High Vigilante , 15 hours ago
This guy should avoid walking out in dark.
His name was Seth!
Bay of Pigs , 13 hours ago
We have to face reality. If Durham doesn't indict some of these people before the
election, nothing is going to happen. It's the end of the line. Time has run out.
"We bullsh#tted some folks...."
dogfish , 13 hours ago
Trump is a charlatan and a fraud. The only winners with Trump are the Zionist they are
Trumps top priority.
play_arrow
OCnStiggs , 13 hours ago
Good thing NYPD copied the HD on that laptop for just this occurrence. There reportedly
at least two copies in safes in NYC. Criminality of the highest order that eclipses by
100,000,000 whatever happened in Watergate. These FBI people need to hang.
Sparehead , 13 hours ago
Safe in NYC? Like all the evidence of criminal banking activity that was lost in World
Trade Center 7?
4Y_LURKER , 12 hours ago
Oh look! We found passports even though steel and gold was vaporized by jet
fuel!!
As the media frenzy around 9/11 reminds us today to "never forget" there is some crucial
information that the establishment absolutely wants all Americans to forget -- the overwhelming
abundance of evidence that pokes serious holes in the official narrative of what happened that
fateful day.
On September 11, 2001, at 5:20 p.m., World Trade Center Building 7 suddenly collapsed into
its own footprint, falling at free fall speed for 2.5 seconds of its seven-second complete
destruction. WTC 7 was not hit by a plane. After it collapsed, Americans were told that office
fires caused a unique -- never before seen -- complete architectural failure leading to the
building collapsing into its own footprint at the rate of gravity.
Despite calls for the evidence to be preserved, New York City officials had the building's
debris removed and destroyed in the ensuing weeks and months, preventing a proper forensic
investigation from ever taking place. Seven years later, federal investigators concluded that
WTC 7 was the first steel-framed high-rise ever to have collapsed solely as a result of
normal office fires.
Naturally, skeptics have been questioning the official story for some time and after moving
from the realm of conspiracy theory into the realm of science, this extensive university study
has found that the official story of fire causing the collapse is simply not true.
As TFTP reported in April,
Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth announced the completed partnership with the
University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) in their final report of an in depth four-year study on what
they say actually brought down WTC 7. According to the press release, contrary to the
conclusions of NIST, the UAF research team finds that the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11 was not
caused by fires but instead was caused by the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the
building.
"Our study found that the fires in WTC 7 could not have caused the observed collapse," said
Professor Leroy Hulsey, the study's principal investigator. "The only way it could have fallen
in the observed manner is by the near-simultaneous failure of every column."
The extensive four-year study was was funded by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth
(AE911Truth), a nonprofit organization representing more than 3,000 architects and engineers
who have signed the organization's petition calling for new investigation into the destruction
of the three World Trade Center towers on 9/11.
"We are proud to have supported the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Professor Leroy
Hulsey in conducting a genuinely scientific study into the reasons for this building's
collapse," said Richard Gage, president and founder of AE911Truth. "It is now incumbent upon
the building community, the media, and government officials to reckon with the implications of
these findings and launch a new full-scale investigation."
According to the study's authors:
The UAF research team utilized three approaches for examining the structural response of
WTC 7 to the conditions that may have occurred on September 11, 2001.
First, we simulated the local structural response to fire loading that may have occurred
below Floor 13, where most of the fires in WTC 7 are reported to have occurred.
Second, we supplemented our own simulation by examining the collapse initiation hypothesis
developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Third, we simulated a number of scenarios within the overall structural system in order to
determine what types of local failures and their locations may have caused the total collapse
to occur as observed.
After conducting comprehensive modeling and studying countless scenarios, the study's
authors, J. Leroy Hulsey, Ph.D., P.E., S.E., UAF, Zhili Quan, Ph.D., Bridge Engineer South
Carolina Department of Transportation, and Feng Xiao, Ph.D., Associate Professor Nanjing
University of Science and Technology Department of Civil Engineering, concluded the
following:
Fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and
private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is
that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of
every column in the building.
The results of this study cannot be dismissed. It completely destroys the narrative that has
been shoved down the throats of Americans for nearly two decades. What's more, this study backs
up thousands of other researchers, scientists, and engineers who have been pointing this out
for years.
As TFTP reported last July, history was made in regard to 9/11 as New York area fire
commissioners called for a new investigation into the tragic events that unfolded that day. The
resolution called for a new investigation due to the "overwhelming evidence" that "pre-planted
explosives . . . caused the destruction of the three World Trade Center buildings."
On July 24, 2019, the Franklin
Square and Munson Fire District , which oversees a volunteer fire department serving a
hamlet of 30,000 residents just outside of Queens, New York, became the first legislative body
in the country to officially support a new investigation into the events of 9/11, according to
Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.
The resolution calling for a new investigation was drafted by Commissioner Christopher Gioia
and it was immediately and unanimously approved by the five commissioners.
"We're a tight-knit community and we never forget our fallen brothers and sisters. You
better believe that when the entire fire service of New York State is on board, we will be an
unstoppable force," said Commissioner Christopher Gioia, adding, "We were the first fire
district to pass this resolution. We won't be the last."
Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence
operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the
world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent
journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world.
Agorist is also the Editor at Large at the Free Thought Project. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter , Steemit , and now on Minds.
19 YEARS LATER, QUESTIONS STILL HANG OVER THE 9/11 ATTACKS Published: September 13,
2020
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DERRICK BROZE, THE LAST AMERICAN VAGABONDAFTER NEARLY TWO DECADES, IT SHOULD BE
PERFECTLY CLEAR TO AMERICANS THAT THE U.S. GOVERNMENT HAS NO INTEREST IN GETTING TO THE BOTTOM
OF THE 9/11 FALSE FLAG. WHATEVER POTENTIAL REMAINS FOR THE TRUTH TO BE SET FREE WILL LARGELY BE
DETERMINED BY THE ACTIVISTS, JOURNALISTS, AND RESEARCHERS WHO MAKE UP THE 9/11 TRUTH
MOVEMENT.
When historians look back upon 2020, they will focus their efforts on understanding the
innumerable ways in which the COVID-19 crisis has affected the world. There will be books,
documentaries, dissertations, and news specials interviewing the politicians and government
officials who played major roles in the events currently unfolding before our eyes. Perhaps, in
time, the questions surrounding the limitations of the PCR test, the variables with the numbers
of COVID-19 cases, and concerns about foreknowledge will be explored in a logical and
fact-based manner. Or, as is the case with the attacks of September 11, 2001, the questions
will be ignored by the masses and the media, while a steadily increasing portion of the
population continues to search for the answers which are needed to fully grasp the scope and
cost of the false flag.
As people from all over the world participate in ceremonies and events to mark the
anniversary of 9/11, the many remaining questions surrounding the attacks loom large. Our
collective minds may be focused on the fears and ramifications related to COVID-19, but
understanding the truth about 9/11 – the last major global event to affect billions of
people – is still an extremely vital part of unraveling the control narrative spun by the
Predator Class.
JUSTICE RISING
On the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks the 9/11 Truth movement is continuing their
nearly two decades battle for the unvarnished facts. The 9/11 Truth movement includes victims,
their families, and experts in a range of fields who are skeptical of the government's official
line on 9/11. Some of the groups include Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth , Firefighters for 9/11 Truth & Unity, Pilots for 9/11
Truth , 9/11 Families United for
Justice Against Terrorism, Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice , and other local activist
groups and individuals from around the globe. It's a loose-knit movement without an official
position, and the opinions, theories and ideas espoused by members often conflict with one
another. However, the movement is united by the belief that the official narrative promoted by
the U.S. government is full of holes.
The non-profit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth has been a vital component of the
movement since the mid-2000's, organizing a number of conferences, protests, outreach events,
and documentary screenings. For the 19th anniversary, AE for 9/11 Truth is organizing an online
conference called "Justice
Rising," from Friday, September 11, to Sunday, September 13. The event will examine "the
continuing struggle for 9/11 justice and the destructive trajectory of the post-9/11 world."
The conference will go for three hours each day and will be open to all free of charge.
On Friday evening the conference will feature Mick Harrison of the Lawyers' Committee for
9/11 Inquiry to discuss the latest on the "request for correction " to the National Institute of
Standards and Technology's (NIST) 2008 report on World Trade Center 7. Many 9/11 Truth
researchers focus on the mysterious collapse of WTC7 as the smoking gun evidence that Americans
were lied to about the attacks. WTC7 was not hit by a plane, yet it collapsed at 5:20 p.m. on
Sept. 11, 2001. According to the NIST, the collapse was caused by office fires leading to
thermal expansion of the building's supportive columns and girders.
Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth submitted the "request for correction" to NIST on
April 15, 2020, demanding the agency revise their position on the collapse of WTC7. AE 9/11
Truth says they provided a detailed eight point report showing that office fires could not have
caused the collapse of the building. However, on August 28, NIST issued its initial decision
denying the request for correction that ten 9/11 family members and 88 architects and
structural engineers submitted.
"Our
request described in meticulous detail eight items of information in NIST's Building 7
report that violated the federal Data Quality Act and NIST's Information Quality
Standards," AE 9/11 Truth writes. "Our goal was to compel NIST to rectify these
violations and in so doing reverse its unsupported conclusion that fire was the cause of
Building 7's collapse."
AE also noted that NIST failed to meet their obligation by providing a "point-by-point
response to all relevant arguments contained in the request," as required by the Data Quality
Act. The non-profit made up of more than 3,000 architects and engineers stated that NIST's
response was a "blatant avoidance of the arguments and facts contained in the request"
designed with the intention of "misleading the uninformed reader." AE 9/11 Truth plans
to appeal the decision by September 27, 2020.
The 19th anniversary Justice Rising conference will also feature three "pioneers" of the
9/11 Truth movement, including David Ray Griffin, Niels Harrit, and Steven Jones. All three men
have been instrumental in providing clarity on the many questions surrounding the 9/11 attacks.
Griffin is an emeritus professor of philosophy of religion and theology at Claremont School of
Theology and Claremont Graduate University. He has published fourteen books which deal
specifically with 9/11, including The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush
Administration and 9/11 , published in 2004.
Niels Harrit served as associate professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen from
1971 to 2009, and is the author of more than 60 published peer-reviewed papers. Since 2007 he
has been actively involved in the global movement for 9/11 truth and is the lead author of a
scientific paper, published in April 2009, describing the findings of active thermitic material
in the dust from the collapses of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2 and 7. It is this presence
of thermitic dust which has lead researchers to conclude that explosive charges were placed
throughout the buildings to assist in their controlled demolition
Steven Jones is a former professor of physics at Brigham Young University. Jones was the
initiator of research for the peer-reviewed paper, "Active Thermitic Material Observed in Dust
from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe," published in the Open Chemical Physics
Journal . Steven is also the author of the influential 2005 paper, "Why Indeed Did the WTC
Buildings Collapse?"
One of the most profound aspects of the Justice Rising conference will be a discussion with
Dr. Leroy Hulsey, former professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who led a multi-year
engineering study evaluating whether fire caused the collapse of WTC7 on September 11, 2001.
Hulsey's study is the subject of an upcoming documentary called SEVEN , directed by Dylan Avery, the director behind the
infamous 9/11 documentary, Loose Change .
Dr. Hulsey's conclusions that fire could not have caused the collapse of World Trade Center
7 should have sent shockwaves through the American political scene, but a lack of reporting on
the topic ensured that only those in the 9/11 Truth movement understood the implications.
Hulsey has previously given presentations detailing how his team eliminated fire as the cause
of the collapse of the 47-story building. Hulsey explained that NIST's report on the collapse
found fires on floors 7 through 9, 11 through 14, 19, 22, 29, and 30. However, there is no
evidence of fire below floor 7, Hulsey said.
The 9/11 Truth community has long pointed to the unique nature of the collapse of the WTC
towers. Never before have fires alone brought down steel skyscrapers. For many in the movement,
Dr. Hulsey's studies are welcomed but also met with skepticism. This is because immediately
following 9/11, activists and researchers have been pointing out the numerous reports and
descriptions of explosions taking place at the base of the Twin Towers. Now, some 9/11 Truthers
wonder if Hulsey's study will make a difference when the public has largely been indoctrinated
to accept the U.S. government's version of events.
Fourteen years ago, AE 9/11 Truth produced the article,
118 Witnesses: The Firefighters' Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers, a review of
interviews conducted with 503 members of the New York Fire Department (FDNY) in the weeks and
months after 9/11. The review revealed that 118 firefighters described witnessing what they
interpreted to be explosions.
More recently, AE has released a report which examined more than 70 hours of 9/11 news
coverage. The report,
How 36 Reporters Brought Us the Twin Towers' Explosive Demolition on 9/11 , sheds light
on how the destruction of the Twin Towers was initially being reported. According to AE 9/11
Truth, the review of the news coverage " reveals that the hypothesis of explosions bringing
down the Twin Towers was not only prevalent among reporters covering the events in New York
City on 9/11 but was, in fact, the dominant hypothesis."
While AE 9/11 Truth remains committed to exposing the flaws in NIST's fire/ thermal
expansion theory, other family members and journalists are dedicated to uncovering the truth
about the funding of the attacks and the many data that remain classified.
For several years, family members were fighting to secure the release of the
now-declassified 28-pages of the "Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before
and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001." Although
the final report amounts to over 800 pages, the 28 pages were classified by former
President George W. Bush shortly after the report was released in 2002. The papers detail the
story of Saudi nationals suspected of being Saudi intelligence agents involved in the terror
attacks. In July 2016, after nearly 15 years of secrecy and resistance from the Bush and Obama
administrations, the report was released to the public and the family members of the victims of
the 9/11 terror attacks.
The release of the 28 pages in conjunction with the passage of the Justice Against Sponsors
of Terrorisms Act (JASTA) ensured the 9/11 victims will have a day in court. As Dan Christensen
of the Florida Bulldog
recently noted , "the last, best chance to obtain actual answers in our lifetime is
likely the immense lawsuit brought by thousands of 9/11 victims and families that's now inching
through U.S. District Court in New York City."
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has become the focus of the 9/11 victims families lawsuit "for
knowingly providing material support and resources to the al Qaeda terrorist organization and
facilitating the September 11 th attacks" in 2001. The Obama administration fought
the passing of the bill, eventually vetoing the legislation before Congress voted to override
the former President. While Donald Trump paid lip service to finding out what was in the
"secret papers," he has since become one of the most vocal supporters of the Saudi Kingdom,
including supporting an
unprecedented weapons deal which fuel the human rights violations
in Yemen .
The Trump Administration – through the Department of Justice and FBI – has
continued the requirements for secrecy in the courtroom. "The government continues to resist
producing thousands of more detailed records, claiming that such material concerning apparent
Saudi involvement prior to 9/11 is a state secret," the Bulldog reports. "In April,
Attorney General William Barr and then-Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell
swore public declarations that their personal assertions of the "state secrets privilege"
were necessary to "protect the national security interests of the United States.""
The 9/11 families have attempted to push back on the government's state secrets claims, but
have faced difficulty due to the already secretive nature of the court room proceedings. For
example, the government's reasoning for state secrets arguments are not even available to the
attorneys representing the families. Christensen notes that only last week the U.S. government
filed a classified declaration from Michael H. Glasheen, acting deputy director, operations
branch, counterterrorism division of the FBI. However, the declaration is only able to be seen
by the judge, with the plaintiffs and the public left in the dark completely.
Interestingly, Christensen notes that the secret assertions are often classified pursuant to
Presidential Executive Order
13526 , signed by former President Obama on Dec. 29, 2009. The order essentially states
that the U.S. government believes that national security is more important than "the free flow
of information."
After nearly two decades, it should be perfectly clear to Americans – and those around
the world affected by American foreign policy – that the U.S. government has no interest
in getting to the bottom of the 9/11 false flag. Whatever potential remains for the truth to be
set free will largely be determined by the activists, journalists, and researchers who make up
the 9/11 Truth movement.
Will the truth die on the vine, like so many other efforts to awaken the masses? Or will
the people of the world finally wake up to the lies that surround the official version of the
attacks of September 11, 2001?
Just ahead of the 19th anniversary commemorating the tragic events of September 11, 2001
when America came under attack, the anti-interventionist thinktank The Quincy Institute for
Responsible Statecraft has featured a study detailing the millions of people displaced
across the globe by US foreign combat operations in the wake of 9/11 .
"The wars the U.S. government has fought since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have forced 37
million people -- and perhaps as many as 59 million -- from their homes , according to a newly
released report from American University and
Brown University's Costs of War Project ," the report
introduces .
It's being called "the first calculation of its kind" given neither the Pentagon, nor State
Department or any other federal agency has kept track of the mass displacements.
The study identifies that out of this 39 million total, eight of the most violent wars and
'counter-insurgency campaigns' are responsible for the vast majority of displacements. They are
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.
These wars were executed or overseen either by the Bush, Obama, or spanning into the Trump
administration.
To drive home the magnitude, The Quincy Institute underscores that "Displacing 37 million
people is equivalent
to removing nearly all the residents of the state of California or all the people in Texas and
Virginia combined."
And further, "The figure is almost as large as the population of Canada ."
Wesley Clark's famous 2007 'Foreign Policy Coup' speech: "We're going to take out seven
countries in five years" after 9/11:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/TY2DKzastu8
American military bases have also rapidly expanded across the globe in the wake of 9/11,
mostly in Africa and the Middle East, as the following map produced by the Investigative
Reporting Workshop (IRW) demonstrates.
"Until now, no one has known how many people the wars have displaced," the report
emphasizes. "Indeed, most Americans are likely unaware that U.S. combat operations have taken
place not only in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, but also in 21 other nations since President
George W. Bush announced a global war on terror ."
* * *
Here are the breakdown of post 9/11 mass displacements by country according to the
Public
Anthropology Clinic :
5.3 million Afghans (representing 26% of the pre-war population) since the start of the
U.S. war in Afghanistan in 2001;
3.7 million Pakistanis (3% of the pre-war population) since the U.S. invasion of
Afghanistan in 2001 quickly became a single war crossing the border into northwest
Pakistan;
1.7 million Filipinos (2%) since the U.S. military joined the Philippine government in
its decades-old war with Abu Sayyaf and other insurgent groups
in 2002;
4.2 million Somalis (46%) since U.S. forces began supporting a UN-recognized Somali
government fighting the
Islamic Courts Union (ICU) in 2002 and, after 2006, the ICU's breakaway militia wing
Al Shabaab ;
4.4 million Yemenis (24%) since the U.S. government began drone assassinations of alleged
terrorists in 2002 and backed a Saudi Arabia-led war against the Houthi movement since
2015;
9.2 million Iraqis (37%) since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and occupation and the
post-2014 war against the Islamic State group;
1.2 million Libyans (19%) since the U.S. and European governments intervened in the 2011
uprising against Moammar Gadhafi fueling an ongoing civil war;
7.1 million Syrians (37%) since the U.S. government began waging war against the Islamic
State in 2014.
" And now, America had elected a black man to the highest office in the land."
Obama is not the first black president. He is black on the outside, but a white liberal on
the inside. The same is true of Kamala Harris. The first black president would be someone
like Tim Scott or Al Sharpton. Someone who grew up in African American culture.
As Americans pause to remember the tragic events of September 11, 2001 which saw almost 3,000 innocents killed in the worst terror
attack in United States history, it might also be worth contemplating the
horrific wars and foreign quagmires unleashed during the subsequent 'war on terror'.
Bush's so-called Global War on Terror targeted 'rogue states' like Saddam's Iraq, but also consistently had a focus on uprooting
and destroying al-Qaeda and other armed Islamist terror organizations (this led to the falsehood that Baathist Saddam and AQ were
in cahoots). But the idea that Washington from the start saw al-Qaeda and its affiliates as some kind of eternal enemy is largely
a myth.
Recall that the US covertly supported the Afghan mujahideen and other international jihadists throughout the 1980's Afghan-Soviet
War, the very campaign in which hardened al-Qaeda terrorists got their start. In 1999 The Guardian in a rare moment of honest
mainstream journalism warned of the Frankenstein
the CIA created -- among their ranks a terror mastermind named Osama bin Laden .
But it was all the way back in 1993 that a then classified intelligence memo warned that the very fighters the CIA previously
trained would soon turn their weapons on the US and its allies. The 'secret' document was declassified in 2009, but has remained
largely obscure in mainstream media reporting, despite being the first to contain a bombshell admission.
"support network that funneled money, supplies, and manpower to supplement the Afghan mujahidin" in the war against the Soviets,
"is now contributing experienced fighters to militant Islamic groups worldwide."
The concluding section contains the most revelatory statements, again remembering these words were written nearly
a decade before the 9/11 attacks :
US support of the mujahidin during the Afghan war will not necessarily protect US interests from attack.
...Americans will become the targets of radical Muslims' wrath. Afghan war veterans, scattered throughout the world, could
surprise the US with violence in unexpected locales.
There it is in black and white print: the United States government knew and bluntly acknowledged that the very militants
it armed and trained to the tune of hundreds
of millions of dollars would eventually turn that very training and those very weapons back on the American people .
And this was not at all a "small" or insignificant group, instead as The Guardian wrote a mere
two years before 9/11 :
American officials estimate that, from 1985 to 1992, 12,500 foreigners were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and urban guerrilla
warfare in Afghan camps the CIA helped to set up .
But don't think for a moment that there was ever a "lesson learned" by Washington.
Instead the CIA and other US agencies repeated the 1980s policy of arming jihadists to overthrow US enemy regimes in places like
Libya and Syria even long after the "lesson" of 9/11. As War on The Rocks recounted :
Despite the passage of time, the issues Ms. Bennett raised in her
1993 work continue to be relevant today.
This fact is a sign of the persistence of the problem of Sunni jihadism and the "wandering mujahidin." Today, of course, the problem
isn't Afghanistan but Syria. While the war there is far from over, there is already widespread nervousness, particularly in Europe,
about what will happen when the
foreign fighters return from that conflict.
There's nothing spontaneous about weeks of public demonstrations in Belarus, largely in the
capital Minsk.
What's going on was made in the USA, planned long before the August 9 Belarusian
presidential election, handily won by incumbent Alexander Lukashenko.
Claims otherwise by US dark forces and establishment media otherwise don't pass the smell
test.
Washington's plot is all about wanting Belarus to go the way of Ukraine -- violently
transformed into a US vassal state after CIA-orchestrated late 2013/early 2014 street protests
in Kiev.
Democratic Ukraine became a fascist police state, a nation unsafe and unfit to live in.
According to former Deputy Prosecutor-General (2010 – 2013), current MP in Ukraine's
parliament Renat Kuzmin:
"There is a large group of people who are dissatisfied with the incumbent president
(Vladimir Zelensky) and are ready to join the coup d'etat in government agencies, law
enforcement agencies, security agencies, including the army" to oust him.
Are US dark forces involved? Kuzmin claims former president Poroshenko is part of the
plot.
Is something similar underway in the US in the run-up to November 3 presidential and
congressional elections -- a scheme by anti-Trump dark forces to deny him a second term, a coup
plot to install Biden as president?
Preventing Belarus from going the way of Ukraine is vital for Russia.
On Monday, Putin and Lukashenko are meeting in Sochi, Russia.
According to the Kremlin's press service, they "plan to discuss the prospects of promoting
integration processes within the Union State and implementing joint energy projects,"
adding:
"During the talks, they plan to discuss key issues of further development of
Russian-Belarusian relations of strategic partnership and alliance."
"A special focus will be placed on the implementation of major joint projects in the
trade-economic, energy and cultural-humanitarian spheres, as well as the prospects for
promoting integration processes within the Union State."
On Sunday, orchestrated anti-Lukashenko demonstrations continued in Minsk, hundreds detained
by security forces, according to a Belarusian Interior Ministry press release.
Joint Russian/Belarusian military exercises are being held in Belarus from September 13
– 25, a statement by Russia's Defense Ministry saying the following:
"In accordance with the schedule of international events for 2020, the planned joint
Belarusian-Russian tactical exercise Slavic Fraternity, which has been held annually since
2015, will be held from 14 to 25 September at the Brestsky training ground in Belarus."
They come at a time when Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin warned about "NATO at
the gates" encroachment, adding:
"The movement of NATO troops is taking place in territory adjacent to us, within the
framework of the Enhanced Forward Presence and Atlantic Resolve operations."
"In particular, the 2nd Battalion of the 69th Armor Regiment is being deployed to the
Pabrade training ground (in Lithuania) 15 kilometers from our border."
"The fact that about 500 people, 29 tanks, and 43 Bradley Fighting Vehicles will be in such
close proximity to our border cannot do anything but worry us."
According to an Estonian Defense Forces press release:
"US Army multipurpose UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters will arrive at the Amari airbase on
Sunday (September 13)."
"Next week, the helicopters will conduct missions around the airbase, central training
ground and the Tapa army base."
"Their task will be to cooperate with the Estonian Defense Forces" -- despite neither
country threatened by any others.
The made in the USA plot to oust Lukashenko shows no signs of ebbing.
A 1999 Russia/Belarus treaty calls for economic integration and mutual cooperation to defend
both nations from foreign threats -- with the intent of Belarus integrating with Russia to
again become one of its republics.
Will Lukashenko and Putin agree that this is the best way forward?
Will Belarus' leader hold a national referendum for the country's citizens to vote up or
down on the issue?
Earlier I stressed that this is what democracy is all about.
If majority Belarusians wish to rejoin Russia, integrating both countries makes most
sense.
It's also a key way to defeat Washington's coup plot.
Protests would likely continue for a while in diminished size and energy, then fade away and
end.
Trailer for COUP 53, a new documentary on the joint CIA-MI6 operation to overthrow the
democratically elected government of Iran.
The coup that toppled a democratically elected government in Iran in August 1953 and
replaced it with a tyrannical monarchy that lasted 25 years was an intelligence operations
whose effects are still felt to this day.
A new documentary recounts the crime with special attention to the often-overlooked role (at
least in the United States) of the British.
(If you live in the United States, you can stream COUP 53 here. If you live in the United Kingdom, you can
stream here. As with all
quality journalism, it will cost you something.)
Britain's Secret Intelligence Service – MI6 – took part in the 1953 kidnapping
of the chief of police of Tehran, Iran, according to a recently recovered interview of an
ex-MI6 operative that is featured in a new documentary film, COUP 53. The full interview
transcript has been posted for the first time by the National Security Archive.
The MI6 operative was a named Norman Darbyshire, described as:
elusive figure who was a key contributor to Britain's clandestine approach toward Iran in
the early 1950s and whose final words on the coup, provided for the Granada Television series
End of Empire , were never aired.
In the interview, Darbyshire said that the Americans took too much credit for ousting Prime
Ministers Mohammed Mossadegh, and replacing him with a general. Mossadegh was described as a
communist sympathizer because he was calling for the British petroleum company to pay the same
royalty fee that American oil companies paid to the Saudis.
What helps make this item noteworthy is the near-total lack of publicly available official
records on Britain's role during the oil nationalization crisis starting in 1951. Closing in
on 70 years after the fact, authorities continue to withhold archival records about the coup.
(The Americans in 2017 published what will probably be the last significant official release
of their records, although more are known to still be classified.)
"... Passenger logs for Epstein's four helicopters and three planes have been subpoenaed by Virgin Islands AG Denise George, who recently sued the disgraced financier's estate for 22 counts including human trafficking, child abuse, neglect, prostitution, aggravated rape, and forced labor, according to a Sunday report by the UK Mirror. ..."
"... Epstein pilot David Rodgers previously provided a passenger log in 2009 tying dozens of politicians, actors, and other celebrities to the infamous sex offender – including former US President Bill Clinton, actor Kevin Spacey, and model Naomi Campbell. ..."
"... George has also subpoenaed more than 10 banks – including JPMorgan, Citibank, and Deutsche Bank – in her quest to get to the bottom of the financial edifice Epstein built up before he died. The financial institutions have been ordered to submit documents related to some 30 corporations, trusts, and nonprofit entities tied to the predatory playboy. ..."
The US Virgin Islands Attorney General has subpoenaed 21 years' worth of deceased pedophile
Jeffrey Epstein's flight logs, reportedly striking fear in the hearts of high-profile
passengers not yet exposed as Lolita Express riders.
Passenger logs for Epstein's four helicopters and three planes have been subpoenaed by
Virgin Islands AG Denise George, who recently sued the disgraced financier's estate for 22
counts including human trafficking, child abuse, neglect, prostitution, aggravated rape, and
forced labor, according to a Sunday report by the UK Mirror.
In addition to the passenger lists, George has requisitioned " complaints or reports of
potentially suspicious conduct " and any " personal notes " the pilots made while
flying Epstein's alleged harem of underage girls around the world. She also wants the names and
contact information of anyone who worked for the pilots – or who " integrated with or
observed " Epstein and his passengers.
Epstein pilot David Rodgers previously provided a passenger log in 2009 tying dozens of
politicians, actors, and other celebrities to the infamous sex offender – including
former US President Bill Clinton, actor Kevin Spacey, and model Naomi Campbell.
However,
lawyers for Epstein's alleged victims have argued that list did not include flights by
Epstein's chief pilot, Larry Visoski, who allegedly worked for him for over 25 years.
" The records that have been subpoenaed will make the ones Rodgers provided look like a
Post-It note ," a source told the Mirror over the weekend, claiming that George's subpoena
had triggered a " panic among many of the rich and famous. "
Epstein's private plane, nicknamed the Lolita Express, counted among its passengers such
luminaries as the UK's Prince Andrew, celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz, actor Chris Tucker,
Harvard economist Larry Summers, Hyatt hotel mogul Tom Pritzker, and model agency manager
Jean-Luc Brunel along with Campbell, Spacey, and Clinton (who the logs show flew with Epstein
over two dozen times). However, the passengers who enjoyed his other aircraft have not been
made public – yet.
George has also subpoenaed more than 10 banks – including JPMorgan, Citibank, and
Deutsche Bank – in her quest to get to the bottom of the financial edifice Epstein built
up before he died. The financial institutions have been ordered to submit documents related to
some 30 corporations, trusts, and nonprofit entities tied to the predatory playboy.
Epstein supposedly committed suicide last year in a Manhattan jail facility, while his
accused madam Ghislaine Maxwell remains imprisoned in a Brooklyn detention center awaiting
trial on charges related to child trafficking and perjury after her arrest earlier this year.
Maxwell's lawyers have struggled to keep documents introduced as part of a recent defamation
suit by one of Epstein's alleged victims under seal, insisting the information would deny her a
fair trial.
US diplomacy is turning into the not-so-subtle art of making demands and ultimatums, Sergey
Lavrov has lamented, as the Americans go it alone in restoring anti-Iran sanctions under a 2015
deal that no longer legally applies.
Washington's reasoning behind bringing back the UN sanctions against Iran looks
"funny," as the majority of UN Security Council members – 13 out of 15 – do
not support activating the 'snapback' mechanism, the Russian Foreign Minister said, in an
exclusive interview with the Al Arabiya news channel.
The council "clearly stated that there is no legal position or moral reasons for anything
close to the snapback and all the statements to the contrary are null and void," he
reminded his audience. The 'snapback' issue leaves Washington at loggerheads with even its
closest allies.
Earlier on Sunday, the three European signatories to the Iran deal – Germany, France
and the UK – stated the return of the sanctions will have no legal effect whatsoever.
However, the Trump administration continues to insist Washington now has the authority to
target any country breaching the "re-imposed" sanctions. For Lavrov, this is telling, in
terms of understanding the quality of US diplomacy.
The Americans lost any talent in diplomacy, unfortunately; they used to have excellent
experts, [but] now what they're doing in foreign policy is to put a demand on the table,
whether they're discussing Iran or anything else.
If their counterpart disagrees and refuses to toe the line, "they put an ultimatum, they
give a deadline and then they impose sanctions, then they make the sanctions
extra-territorial." Regrettably, the European Union also "is engaging in the same tricks
more and more," Lavrov noted.
On Saturday, Washington moved to bring back sweeping UN sanctions against Tehran, insisting
it was acting within its own right to do so as an original party to the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 pact Iran sealed with major world powers. The US left the deal
in 2018 following a decision by President Donald Trump.
"I can only remind them that they should respect the hierarchy of the American
administration, because their boss, President Trump, has personally signed an official decree
withdrawing the United States from the JCPOA," Lavrov added sarcastically.
Sanctions aside, Washington is also busy trying to prevent the lifting of the UN arms
embargo on Iran, set to expire on October 18. This endeavor doesn't make much sense either, the
Russian minister commented. "There is no such thing as an arms embargo against Iran," he
clarified. The UN Security Council reiterated the embargo will end on that date, and "there
would be no limitations whatsoever after the expiration of this timeframe."
Unfortunately in his brilliant analysis of USA-Russia relations Stephen Cohen never pointed out that the USA policy toward
Russia is dictated by the interests of maintaining global neoliberal empire and the concept of "Full Spectrum Dominance" which was
adopted by the USA neoliberal elite after the collapse of the USSR.
Like British empire the USA neoliberal empire is now overextended, metropolia is in secular stagnation with deterioration
standard of living of the bottom 80% of population, so the USA under Trump became more aggressive and dangerous on the international
arena. Trump administration behaves behaves like a cornered rat on international arena.
Notable quotes:
"... On Friday, 18 September, professor Steve Cohen passed away in New York City and we, the "dissident" community of Americans standing for peace with Russia – and for peace with the world at large – lost a towering intellectual and skillful defender of our cause who enjoyed an audience of millions by his weekly broadcasts on the John Batchelor Show, WABC Radio. ..."
"... from the start of the Information Wars against Russia during the George W. Bush administration following Putin's speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, no voice questioning the official propaganda line in America was tolerated. Steve Cohen, who in the 1990s had been a welcome guest on U.S. national television and a widely cited expert in print media suddenly found himself blacklisted and subjected to the worst of McCarthyite style, ad hominem attacks. ..."
"... the opposition to Steve was led by experts in the Ukrainian and other minority peoples sub-categories of the profession who were militantly opposed not just to him personally but to any purely objective, not to mention sympathetic treatment of Russian leadership in the territorial expanse of Eurasia. ..."
"... Almost no one outside our 'dissident' community is concerned about the possibility of Armageddon in say two years' time due to miscalculations and bad luck in our pursuing economic, informational and military confrontation with Russia and China. ..."
"... My point in this discussion is that in the last decade of his life Stephen Cohen became one of the nation's most fearless and persistent defenders of the right to Free Speech. ..."
"... It was forced upon him by The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major media who pilloried him or blacklisted him over his unorthodox, unsanctioned, nonconformist views on the "Putin regime." It was forced upon him by university colleagues who sought to deny his right to establish graduate school fellowships in Russian affairs bearing his name and that of his mentor at Indiana University, Professor Tucker. ..."
"... In the face of vicious personal attacks from these McCarthyite forces, in the face of hate mail and even threats to his life, Steve decided to set up The American Committee and to recruit to its governing board famous, patriotic Americans and the descendants of the most revered families in the country. In this he succeeded, and it is to his credit that a moral counter force to the stampeding bulls of repression was erected and has survived to this day. ..."
On Friday, 18 September, professor Steve Cohen passed away in New York City and we, the
"dissident" community of Americans standing for peace with Russia – and for peace with
the world at large – lost a towering intellectual and skillful defender of our cause who
enjoyed an audience of millions by his weekly broadcasts on the John Batchelor Show, WABC
Radio.
A year ago, I reviewed his latest book, War With Russia? which drew upon the
material of those programs and took this scholar turned journalist into a new and highly
accessible genre of oral readings in print. The narrative style may have been more relaxed,
with simplified syntax, but the reasoning remained razor sharp. I urge those who are today
paying tribute to Steve, to buy and read the book, which is his best legacy.
From start to finish, Stephen F. Cohen was among America's best historians of his
generation, putting aside the specific subject matter that he treated: Nikolai Bukharin, his
dissertation topic and the material of his first and best known book; or, to put it more
broadly, the history of Russia (USSR) in the 20 th century. He was one of the very
rare cases of an historian deeply attentive to historiography, to causality and to logic. I
understood this when I read a book of his from the mid-1980s in which he explained why Russian
(Soviet) history was no longer attracting young students of quality: because there were no
unanswered questions, because we smugly assumed that we knew about that country all that there
was to know. That was when our expert community told us with one voice that the USSR was
entrapped in totalitarianism without any prospect for the overthrow of its oppressive
regime.
But my recollections of Steve also have a personal dimension going back six years or so when
a casual email correspondence between us flowered into a joint project that became the launch
of the American Committee for East West Accord (ACEWA). This was a revival of a
pro-détente association of academics and business people that existed from the mid-1970s
to the early 1990s, when, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the removal of the
Communist Party from power, the future of Russia in the family of nations we call the
'international community' seemed assured and there appeared to be no further need for such an
association as ACEWA.
I hasten to add that in the original ACEWA Steve and I were two ships that passed in the
night. With his base in Princeton, he was a protégé of the dean of diplomats then
in residence there, George Kennan, who was the leading light on the academic side of the ACEWA.
I was on the business side of the association, which was led by Don Kendall, chairman of
Pepsico and also for much of the 1970s chairman of the US-USSR Trade and Economic Council of
which I was also a member. I published pro-détente articles in their newsletter and
published a lengthy piece on cooperation with the Soviet Union in agricultural and food
processing domains, my specialty at that time, in their collection of essays by leaders in the
U.S. business community entitled Common Sense in U.S.-Soviet Trade .
The academic contingent had, as one might assume, a 'progressive' coloration, while the
business contingent had a Nixon Republican coloration. Indeed, in the mid-1980s these two sides
split in their approach to the growing peace movement in the U.S. that was fed by opposition in
the 'thinking community' on university campuses to Ronald Reagan's Star Wars agenda. Kendall
shut the door at ACEWA to rabble rousing and the association did not rise to the occasion, so
that its disbanding in the early '90s went unnoticed.
In the re-incorporated American Committee, I helped out by assuming the formal obligations
of Treasurer and Secretary, and also became the group's European Coordinator from my base in
Brussels. At this point my communications with Steve were almost daily and emotionally quite
intense. This was a time when America's expert community on Russian affairs once again felt
certain that it knew everything there was to know about the country, and most particularly
about the nefarious "Putin regime." But whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, polite debate about the
USSR/Russia was entirely possible both behind closed doors and in public space, from the
start of the Information Wars against Russia during the George W. Bush administration following
Putin's speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, no voice questioning the
official propaganda line in America was tolerated. Steve Cohen, who in the 1990s had been a
welcome guest on U.S. national television and a widely cited expert in print media suddenly
found himself blacklisted and subjected to the worst of McCarthyite style, ad hominem
attacks.
From my correspondence and several meetings with Steve at this time both in his New York
apartment and here in Brussels, when he and Katrina van der Heuvel came to participate in a
Round Table dedicated to relations with Russia at the Brussels Press Club that I arranged, I
knew that Steve was deeply hurt by these vitriolic attacks. He was at the time waging a
difficult campaign to establish a fellowship in support of graduate studies in Russian affairs.
It was touch and go, because of vicious opposition from some stalwarts of the profession to any
fellowship that bore Steve's name. Allow me to put the 'i' on this dispute: the opposition
to Steve was led by experts in the Ukrainian and other minority peoples sub-categories of the
profession who were militantly opposed not just to him personally but to any purely objective,
not to mention sympathetic treatment of Russian leadership in the territorial expanse of
Eurasia. In the end, Steve and Katrina prevailed. The fellowships exist and, hopefully,
will provide sustenance to future studies when American attitudes towards Russia become less
politicized.
At all times and on all occasions, Steve Cohen was a voice of reason above all. The problem
of our age is that we are now not only living in a post-factual world, but in a post-logic
world. The public reads day after day the most outrageous and illogical assertions about
alleged Russian misdeeds posted by our most respected mainstream media including The New
York Times and The Washington Post . Almost no one dares to raise a hand and
suggest that this reporting is propaganda and that the public is being brainwashed. Steve did
exactly that in War With Russia? in a brilliant and restrained text.
Regrettably today we have no peace movement to speak of. Youth and our 'progressive' elites
are totally concerned over the fate of humanity in 30 or 40 years' time as a consequence of
Global Warming and rising seas. That is the essence of the Green Movement. Almost no one
outside our 'dissident' community is concerned about the possibility of Armageddon in say two
years' time due to miscalculations and bad luck in our pursuing economic, informational and
military confrontation with Russia and China.
I fear it will take only some force majeure development such as we had in 1962 during the
Cuban Missile Crisis to awaken the broad public to the risks to our very survival that we are
incurring by ignoring the issues that Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Princeton and New
York University was bringing to the airwaves week after week on his radio program.
Postscript
In terms of action, the new ACEWA was even less effective than its predecessor, which had
avoided linking up with the peace movement of the 1980s and sought to exert influence on policy
through armchair talks with Senators and other statesmen in Washington behind closed doors of
(essentially) men's clubs.
However, the importance of the new ACEWA, and the national importance of Stephen Cohen lay
elsewhere.
This question of appraising Stephen Cohen's national importance is all the more timely given
that on the day of his death, 18 September, the nation also lost Supreme Justice Ruth Ginsburg,
about whose national importance no Americans, whether her fans or her opponents, had any
doubt.
My point in this discussion is that in the last decade of his life Stephen Cohen became
one of the nation's most fearless and persistent defenders of the right to Free Speech. It
was not a role that he sought. It was thrust upon him by the expert community of international
affairs, including the Council on Foreign Relations, from which he reluctantly resigned over
this matter.
It was forced upon him by The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major media
who pilloried him or blacklisted him over his unorthodox, unsanctioned, nonconformist views on
the "Putin regime." It was forced upon him by university colleagues who sought to deny his
right to establish graduate school fellowships in Russian affairs bearing his name and that of
his mentor at Indiana University, Professor Tucker.
In the face of vicious personal attacks from these McCarthyite forces, in the face of
hate mail and even threats to his life, Steve decided to set up The American Committee and to
recruit to its governing board famous, patriotic Americans and the descendants of the most
revered families in the country. In this he succeeded, and it is to his credit that a moral
counter force to the stampeding bulls of repression was erected and has survived to this
day.
[If you found value in this article, you should be interested to read my latest collection
of essays entitled A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, published in
November 2019 and available in e-book, paperback and hardbound formats from amazon, barnes
& noble, bol.com, fnac, Waterstones and other online retailers. Use the "View Inside" tab
on the book's webpages to browse.]
What I liked most about this article was the highlighting of impossible-to-counter
narratives, the hypocrisy of Western democracy promotion (even as Western governments fellate
domestic and foreign economic elites), and the denigration of nationalism from 1990-2016.
Sadly, the author does a disservice in suggesting that such manipulations are past. Instead,
the Western power-elite has done what it does best: co-opt a 'winning' narrative
(nationalism) and double-down.
Other deficiencies:
Ignores the fact that the US Deep State, caretakers of the Empire, hasn't accepted
defeat. Since 2014 they have been actively trying to reverse what they see as a major
set-back (not defeat).
Via economic sanctions, trade wars, propaganda, and military tensions the Empire is
waging a hybrid war against what it calls the "revisionist" efforts of Russia and
China.
Plays into the propaganda narrative of Trump as populist.
Fails to see the 1990's 'economic shock therapy' as a deliberate attempt to push
Russia into total capitulation. This, darker view, was confirmed obliquely by Kissinger in
his interview with ft in which he stated that no one could foresee the ability of Russia to
absorb pain.
A very good article. A better title would be "How neoliberalism collapsed" Any religious doctrine sonner or later collased
under the weight of corruption of its prisets and unrealistic assumptions about the society. Neoliberalism in no expection as in
heart it is secular religion based on deification of markets.
He does not discuss the role of Harvard Mafiosi in destruction of Russian (and other xUSSR republics) economy in 1990th, mass
looting, empowerment of people (with pensioners experiencing WWII level of starvation) and creation of mafia capitalism on post
Soviet state. But the point he made about the process are right. Yeltsin mafia, like Yeltsin himself, were the product of USA and
GB machinations
Notable quotes:
"... If the US (and the UK, if as usual we tag along) approach the relationship with Beijing with anything like the combination of arrogance, ignorance, greed, criminality, bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which western elites managed the period after the Cold War, then we risk losing the competition and endangering the world. ..."
"... One of the most malign effects of western victory in 1989-91 was to drown out or marginalise criticism of what was already a deeply flawed western social and economic model. In the competition with the USSR, it was above all the visible superiority of the western model that eventually destroyed Soviet communism from within. ..."
"... These beliefs interacted to produce a dominant atmosphere of "there is no alternative," which made it impossible and often in effect forbidden to conduct a proper public debate on the merits of the big western presumptions, policies or plans of the era ..."
"... This was a sentiment I encountered again and again (if not often so frankly expressed) in western establishment institutions in that era: in economic journals if it was suggested that rapid privatisation in the former USSR would lead to massive corruption, social resentment and political reaction; in security circles, if anyone dared to question the logic of Nato expansion ..."
"... Accompanying this overwhelmingly dominant political and economic ideology was an American geopolitical vision equally grandiose in ambition and equally blind to the lessons of history. This was summed up in the memorandum on "Defence Planning Guidance 1994-1999," drawn up in April 1992 for the Bush Senior administration by Under-Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and subsequently leaked to the media ..."
"... By claiming for the US the right of unilateral intervention anywhere in the world and denying other major powers a greater role in their regions, this strategy essentially extended the Monroe Doctrine (which effectively defined the "western hemisphere" as the US sphere of influence) to the entire planet: an ambition greater than that of any previous power. The British Empire at its height knew that it could never intervene unilaterally on the continent of Europe or in Central America. The most megalomaniac of European rulers understood that other great powers with influence in their own areas of the world would always exist. ..."
"... "A stable and healthy polity and economy must be based on some minimal moral values" ..."
"... Many liberals gave the impression of complete indifference to the resulting immiseration of the Russian population in these years. At a meeting of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington that I attended later, former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar boasted to an applauding US audience of how he had destroyed the Russian military industrial complex. The fact that this also destroyed the livelihoods of tens of millions of Russians and Ukrainians was not mentioned. ..."
"... This attitude was fed by contempt on the part of the educated classes of Moscow and St Petersburg for ordinary Russians, who were dubbed Homo Sovieticus and treated as an inferior species whose loathsome culture was preventing the liberal elites from taking their rightful place among the "civilised" nations of the west. This frame of mind was reminiscent of the traditional attitude of white elites in Latin America towards the Indio and Mestizo majorities in their countries. ..."
"... I vividly remember one Russian liberal journalist state his desire to fire machine guns into crowds of elderly Russians who joined Communist demonstrations to protest about the collapse of their pensions. The response of the western journalists present was that this was perhaps a little bit excessive, but to be excused since the basic sentiment was correct. ..."
"... If the post-Cold War world order was a form of US imperialism, it now looks like an empire in which rot in the over-extended periphery has spread to the core. The economic and social patterns of 1990s Russia and Ukraine have come back to haunt the west, though so far thank God in milder form. The massive looting of Russian state property and the systematic evasion of taxes by Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs was only possible with the help of western banks, which transferred the proceeds to the west and the Caribbean. This crime was euphemised in the western discourse (naturally including the Economist ) as "capital flight." ..."
"... The indifference of Russian elites to the suffering of the Russian population has found a milder echo in the neglect of former industrial regions across Britain, Western Europe and the US that did so much to produce the votes for Brexit, for Trump and for populist nationalist parties in Europe. The catastrophic plunge in Russian male life expectancy in the 1990s has found its echo in the unprecedented decline in white working-class male life expectancy in the US. ..."
"... Perhaps the greatest lesson of the period after the last Cold War is that in the end, a stable and healthy polity and economy must be based on some minimal moral values. ..."
"... Those analysing the connection between Russia and Trump's administration have looked in the wrong place. The explanation of Trump's success is not that Putin somehow mesmerised American voters in 2016. It is that populations abandoned by their elites are liable to extreme political responses; and that societies whose economic elites have turned ethics into a joke should not be surprised if their political leaders too become scoundrels. ..."
A s the US prepares to plunge into a new cold war with China in which its chances do not
look good, it's an appropriate time to examine how we went so badly wrong after "victory" in
the last Cold War. Looking back 30 years from the grim perspective of 2020, it is a challenge
even for those who were adults at the time to remember just how triumphant the west appeared in
the wake of the collapse of Soviet communism and the break-up of the USSR itself.
Today, of the rich fruits promised by that great victory, only wretched fragments remain.
The much-vaunted "peace dividend," savings from military spending, was squandered. The
opportunity to use the resources freed up to spread prosperity and deal with urgent social
problems was wasted, and -- even worse -- the US military budget is today higher than ever.
Attempts to mitigate the apocalyptic threat of climate change have fallen far short of what the
scientific consensus deems to be urgently necessary. The chance to solve the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and stabilise the Middle East was thrown away even before 9/11 and
the disastrous US response. The lauded "new world order" of international harmony and
co-operation -- heralded by the elder George Bush after the first Gulf War -- is a tragic joke.
Britain's European dream has been destroyed, and geopolitical stability on the European
continent has been lost due chiefly to new and mostly unnecessary tension with Moscow. The one
previously solid-seeming achievement, the democratisation of Eastern Europe, is looking
questionable, as Poland and Hungary (see Samira Shackle, p20) sink into semi-authoritarian
nationalism.
Russia after the Cold War was a shambles and today it remains a weak economy with a limited
role on the world stage, concerned mainly with retaining some of its traditional areas of
influence. China is a vastly more formidable competitor. If the US (and the UK, if as usual we
tag along) approach the relationship with Beijing with anything like the combination of
arrogance, ignorance, greed, criminality, bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which
western elites managed the period after the Cold War, then we risk losing the competition and
endangering the world.
One of the most malign effects of western victory in 1989-91 was to drown out or marginalise
criticism of what was already a deeply flawed western social and economic model. In the
competition with the USSR, it was above all the visible superiority of the western model that
eventually destroyed Soviet communism from within. Today, the superiority of the western model
to the Chinese model is not nearly so evident to most of the world's population; and it is on
successful western domestic reform that victory in the competition with China will depend.
Hubris
Western triumph and western failure were deeply intertwined. The very completeness of the
western victory both obscured its nature and legitimised all the western policies of the day,
including ones that had nothing to do with the victory over the USSR, and some that proved
utterly disastrous.
As Alexander Zevin has written of the house journal of Anglo-American elites, the
revolutions in Eastern Europe "turbocharged the neoliberal dynamic at the Economist ,
and seemed to stamp it with an almost providential seal." In retrospect, the magazine's 1990s
covers have a tragicomic appearance, reflecting a degree of faith in the rightness and
righteousness of neoliberal capitalism more appropriate to a religious cult.
These beliefs interacted to produce a dominant atmosphere of "there is no alternative,"
which made it impossible and often in effect forbidden to conduct a proper public debate on the
merits of the big western presumptions, policies or plans of the era. As a German official told
me when I expressed some doubt about the wisdom of rapid EU enlargement, "In my ministry we are
not even allowed to think about that."
This was a sentiment I encountered again and again (if not often so frankly expressed) in
western establishment institutions in that era: in economic journals if it was suggested that
rapid privatisation in the former USSR would lead to massive corruption, social resentment and
political reaction; in security circles, if anyone dared to question the logic of Nato
expansion; and almost anywhere if it was pointed out that the looting of former Soviet
republics was being assiduously encouraged and profited from by western banks, and regarded
with benign indifference by western governments.
The atmosphere of the time is (nowadays notoriously) summed up in Francis Fukuyama's The
End of History , which essentially predicted that western liberal capitalist democracy
would now be the only valid and successful economic and political model for all time. In fact,
what victory in the Cold War ended was not history but the study of history by western
elites.
"The US claiming the right of unilateral intervention anywhere in the world was an
ambition greater than that of any previous power"
A curious feature of 1990s capitalist utopian thought was that it misunderstood the
essential nature of capitalism, as revealed by its real (as opposed to faith-based) history.
One is tempted to say that Fukuyama should have paid more attention to Karl Marx and a famous
passage in The Communist Manifesto :
"The bourgeoisie [ie capitalism] cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the
instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole
relations of society All fixed, fast-frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can
ossify the bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market drawn from under the
feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old established national industries
have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed "
Then again, Marx himself made exactly the same mistake in his portrayal of a permanent
socialist utopia after the overthrow of capitalism. The point is that utopias, being perfect,
are unchanging, whereas continuous and radical change, driven by technological development, is
at the heart of capitalism -- and, according to Marx, of the whole course of human history. Of
course, those who believed in a permanently successful US "Goldilocks economy" -- not too hot,
and not too cold -- also managed to forget 300 years of periodic capitalist economic
crises.
Though much mocked at the time, Fukuyama's vision came to dominate western thinking. This
was summed up in the universally employed but absurd phrases "Getting to Denmark" (as if Russia
and China were ever going to resemble Denmark) and "The path to democracy and the free
market" (my italics), which became the mantra of the new and lucrative academic-bureaucratic
field of "transitionology." Absurd, because the merest glance at modern history reveals
multiple different "paths" to -- and away from -- democracy and capitalism, not to mention
myriad routes that have veered towards one at the same time as swerving away from the
other.
Accompanying this overwhelmingly dominant political and economic ideology was an American
geopolitical vision equally grandiose in ambition and equally blind to the lessons of history.
This was summed up in the memorandum on "Defence Planning Guidance 1994-1999," drawn up in
April 1992 for the Bush Senior administration by Under-Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and
Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and subsequently leaked to the media. Its central message was:
"The US must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds
the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or
pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests We must maintain the
mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global
role "
By claiming for the US the right of unilateral intervention anywhere in the world and
denying other major powers a greater role in their regions, this strategy essentially extended
the Monroe Doctrine (which effectively defined the "western hemisphere" as the US sphere of
influence) to the entire planet: an ambition greater than that of any previous power. The
British Empire at its height knew that it could never intervene unilaterally on the continent
of Europe or in Central America. The most megalomaniac of European rulers understood that other
great powers with influence in their own areas of the world would always exist.
While that 1992 Washington paper spoke of the "legitimate interests" of other states, it
clearly implied that it would be Washington that would define what interests were legitimate,
and how they could be pursued. And once again, though never formally adopted, this "doctrine"
became in effect the standard operating procedure of subsequent administrations. In the early
2000s, when its influence reached its most dangerous height, military and security elites would
couch it in the terms of "full spectrum dominance." As the younger President Bush declared in
his State of the Union address in January 2002, which put the US on the road to the invasion of
Iraq: "By the grace of God, America won the Cold War A world once divided into two armed camps
now recognises one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America."
Nemesis
Triumphalism led US policymakers, and their transatlantic followers, to forget one cardinal
truth about geopolitical and military power: that in the end it is not global and absolute, but
local and relative. It is the amount of force or influence a state wants to bring to bear in a
particular place and on a -particular issue, relative to the power that a rival state is
willing and able to bring to bear. The truth of this has been shown repeatedly over the past
generation. For all America's overwhelming superiority on paper, it has turned out that many
countries have greater strength than the US in particular places: Russia in Georgia and
Ukraine, Russia and Iran in Syria, China in the South China Sea, and even Pakistan in southern
Afghanistan.
American over-confidence, accepted by many Europeans and many Britons especially, left the
US in a severely weakened condition to conduct what should have been clear as far back as the
1990s to be the great competition of the future -- that between Washington and Beijing.
On the one hand, American moves to extend Nato to the Baltics and then (abortively) on to
Ukraine and Georgia, and to abolish Russian influence and destroy Russian allies in the Middle
East, inevitably produced a fierce and largely successful Russian nationalist reaction. Within
Russia, the US threat to its national interests helped to consolidate and legitimise Putin's
control. Internationally, it ensured that Russia would swallow its deep-seated fears of China
and become a valuable partner of Beijing.
On the other hand, the benign and neglectful way in which Washington regarded the rise of
China in the generation after the Cold War (for example, the blithe decision to allow China to
join the World Trade Organisation) was also rooted in ideological arrogance. Western
triumphalism meant that most of the US elites were convinced that as a result of economic
growth, the Chinese Communist state would either democratise or be overthrown; and that China
would eventually have to adopt the western version of economics or fail economically. This was
coupled with the belief that good relations with China could be predicated on China accepting a
so-called "rules-based" international order in which the US set the rules while also being free
to break them whenever it wished; something that nobody with the slightest knowledge of Chinese
history should
have believed.
Throughout, the US establishment discourse (Democrat as much as Republican) has sought to
legitimise American global hegemony by invoking the promotion of liberal democracy. At the same
time, the supposedly intrinsic connection between economic change, democracy and peace was
rationalised by cheerleaders such as the New York Times 's indefatigable Thomas
Friedman, who advanced the (always absurd, and now flatly and repeatedly falsified) "Golden
Arches theory of Conflict
Prevention." This vulgarised version of Democratic Peace Theory pointed out that two countries
with McDonald's franchises had never been to war. The humble and greasy American burger was
turned into a world-historical symbol of the buoyant modern middle classes with too much to
lose to countenance war.
Various equally hollow theories postulated cast-iron connections between free markets and
guaranteed property rights on the one hand, and universal political rights and freedoms on the
other, despite the fact that even within the west, much of political history can be
characterised as the fraught and complex brokering of accommodations between these two sets of
things.
And indeed, since the 1990s democracy has not advanced in the world as a whole, and belief
in the US promotion of democracy has been discredited by US patronage of the authoritarian and
semi-authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, India and elsewhere. Of the predominantly
Middle Eastern and South Asian students whom I teach at Georgetown University in Qatar, not one
-- even among the liberals -- believes that the US is sincerely committed to spreading
democracy; and, given their own regions' recent history, there is absolutely no reason why they
should believe this.
The one great triumph of democratisation coupled with free market reform was -- or appeared
to be -- in the former communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, and this success was
endlessly cited as the model for political and economic reform across
the globe.
But the portrayal of East European reform in the west failed to recognise the central role
of local nationalism. Once again, to talk of this at the time was to find oneself in effect
excluded from polite society, because to do so called into question the self-evident
superiority and universal appeal of liberal reform. The overwhelming belief of western
establishments was that nationalism was a superstition that was fast losing its hold on people
who, given the choice, could everywhere be relied on to act like rational consumers, rather
than citizens rooted in one particular land.
The more excitable technocrats imagined that nation state itself (except the US of course)
was destined to wither away. This was also the picture reflected back to western observers and
analysts by liberal reformers across the region, who whether or not they were genuinely
convinced of this, knew what their western sponsors wanted to hear. Western economic and
cultural hegemony produced a sort of mirror game, a copulation of illusions in which local
informants provided false images to the west, which then reflected them back to the east, and
so on.
Always the nation
Yet one did not have to travel far outside the centres of Eastern European cities to find
large parts of populations outraged by the moral and cultural changes ordained by the EU, the
collapse of social services, and the (western-indulged) seizure of public property by former
communist elites. So why did Eastern Europeans swallow the whole western liberal package of the
time? They did so precisely because of their nationalism, which persuaded them that if they did
not pay the cultural and economic price of entry into the EU and Nato, they would sooner or
later fall back under the dreaded hegemony of Moscow. For them, unwanted reform was the price
that the nation had to pay for US protection. Not surprisingly, once membership of these
institutions was secured, a powerful populist and nationalist backlash set in.
Western blindness to the power of nationalism has had several bad consequences for western
policy, and the cohesion of "the west." In Eastern Europe, it would in time lead to the
politically almost insane decision of the EU to try to order the local peoples, with their
deeply-rooted ethnic nationalism and bitter memories of outside dictation, to accept large
numbers of Muslim refugees. The backlash then became conjoined with the populist reactions in
Western Europe, which led to Brexit and the sharp decline of centrist parties across the
EU.
More widely, this blindness to the power of nationalism led the US grossly to underestimate
the power of nationalist sentiment in Russia, China and Iran, and contributed to the US attempt
to use "democratisation" as a means to overthrow their regimes. All that this has succeeded in
doing is to help the regimes concerned turn nationalist sentiment against local liberals, by
accusing them of being US stooges.
"A stable and healthy polity and economy must be based on
some minimal moral values"
Russian liberals in the 1990s were mostly not really US agents as such, but the collapse of
Communism led some to a blind adulation of everything western and to identify unconditionally
with US policies. In terms of public image, this made them look like western lackeys; in terms
of policy, it led to the adoption of the economic "shock therapy" policies advocated by the
west. Combined with monstrous corruption and the horribly disruptive collapse of the Soviet
single market, this had a shattering effect on Russian industry and the living standards of
ordinary Russians.
Many liberals gave the impression of complete indifference to the resulting immiseration of
the Russian population in these years. At a meeting of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington
that I attended later, former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar boasted to an applauding US audience
of how he had destroyed the Russian military industrial complex. The fact that this also
destroyed the livelihoods of tens of millions of Russians and Ukrainians was not mentioned.
This attitude was fed by contempt on the part of the educated classes of Moscow and St
Petersburg for ordinary Russians, who were dubbed Homo Sovieticus and treated as an
inferior species whose loathsome culture was preventing the liberal elites from taking their
rightful place among the "civilised" nations of the west. This frame of mind was reminiscent of
the traditional attitude of white elites in Latin America towards the Indio and Mestizo
majorities in their countries.
I vividly remember one Russian liberal journalist state his desire to fire machine guns into
crowds of elderly Russians who joined Communist demonstrations to protest about the collapse of
their pensions. The response of the western journalists present was that this was perhaps a
little bit excessive, but to be excused since the basic sentiment was correct.
The Russian liberals of the 1990s were crazy to reveal this contempt to the people whose
votes they needed to win. So too was Hillary Clinton, with her disdain for the "basket of
deplorables" in the 2016 election, much of the Remain camp in the years leading up to Brexit,
and indeed the European elites in the way they rammed through the Maastricht Treaty and the
euro in the 1990s.
If the post-Cold War world order was a form of US imperialism, it now looks like an empire
in which rot in the over-extended periphery has spread to the core. The economic and social
patterns of 1990s Russia and Ukraine have come back to haunt the west, though so far thank God
in milder form. The massive looting of Russian state property and the systematic evasion of
taxes by Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs was only possible with the help of western banks,
which transferred the proceeds to the west and the Caribbean. This crime was euphemised in the
western discourse (naturally including the Economist ) as "capital flight."
Peter Mandelson qualified his famous remark that the Blair government was "intensely relaxed
about people becoming filthy rich" with the words "as long as they pay their taxes." The whole
point, however, about the filthy Russian, Ukrainian, Nigerian, Pakistani and other money that
flowed to and through London was not just that so much of it was stolen, but that it was
escaping taxation, thereby harming the populations at home twice over. The infamous euphemism
"light-touch regulation" was in effect a charter
for this.
In a bitter form of poetic justice, however, "light-touch regulation" paved the way for the
2008 economic crisis in the west itself, and western economic elites too (especially in the US)
would also seize this opportunity to move their money into tax havens. This has done serious
damage to state revenues, and to the fundamental faith of ordinary people in the west that the
rich are truly subject to the same laws as them.
The indifference of Russian elites to the suffering of the Russian population has found a
milder echo in the neglect of former industrial regions across Britain, Western Europe and the
US that did so much to produce the votes for Brexit, for Trump and for populist nationalist
parties in Europe. The catastrophic plunge in Russian male life expectancy in the 1990s has
found its echo in the unprecedented decline in white working-class male life expectancy in the
US.
Perhaps the greatest lesson of the period after the last Cold War is that in the end, a
stable and healthy polity and economy must be based on some minimal moral values. To say this
to western economists, businessmen and financial journalists in the 1990s was to receive the
kindly contempt usually accorded to religious cranks. The only value recognised was shareholder
value, a currency in which the crimes of the Russian oligarchs could be excused because their
stolen companies had "added value." Any concern about duty to the Russian people as a whole, or
the fact that tolerance of these crimes would make it grotesque to demand honesty of policemen
or civil servants, were dismissed as irrelevant sentimentality.
Bringing it all back home
We in the west are living with the consequences of a generation of such attitudes. Western
financial elites have mostly not engaged in outright illegality; but then again, they usually
haven't needed to, since governments have made it easy for them to abide by the letter of the
law while tearing its spirit to pieces. We are belatedly recognising that, as Franklin Foer
wrote in the Atlantic last year: "New York, Los Angeles and Miami have joined London as
the world's most desired destinations for laundered money. This boom has enriched the American
elites who have enabled it -- and it has degraded the nation's political and social mores in
the process. While everyone else was heralding an emergent globalist world that would take on
the best values of America, [Richard] Palmer [a former CIA station chief in Moscow] had
glimpsed the dire risk of the opposite: that the values of the kleptocrats would become
America's own. This grim vision is now nearing fruition."
Those analysing the connection between Russia and Trump's administration have looked in the
wrong place. The explanation of Trump's success is not that Putin somehow mesmerised American
voters in 2016. It is that populations abandoned by their elites are liable to extreme
political responses; and that societies whose economic elites have turned ethics into a joke
should not be surprised if their political leaders too become scoundrels.
"... There is no chance of mending relations and even less of achieving some security partnership between US and Russia. The rift will only keep on widening as US political and financial elites are growing increasingly desperate (and thus even more aggressive) while Russia abandons its attempts to please the haters and moves its focus on to its future prospective partners who have genuine interest in cooperating with Russia and achieving common goals.... including opposing the common enemy if you like! Well at least I hope so: the only reason why US wish to get closer to Russia would be to stab it in the back... one more time! ..."
Speaking as an Independent, I say that our country, the USA, has engineered past confilcts and wars in order to feed the military
industrial complex. Not so much that it results in a nuke-shooting war, but in a regular non-nuke shooting war. The solution?
Send the sons and daughters of the politicians into direct combat, every time they approve another war. That should keep things
a bit more peaceful.
Professor Cohen is this nation's most objective and therefore most valuable thinker on Russia! The charge that his views are
"not patriotic" is a compliment rather than the insult they intended. A scholar's views are only valuable to the public and, more
importantly, policy makers, if they are OBJECTIVE!!! Which is to say that he follows the FACTS wherever they lead!
Any "discussion" with no mention of the supranational central bank cartel is intentional deceptive omission. The "brass ring"
is forced use of petro-dollars. The central bank stock holders and bankers loaning all dollars into existence as national debt,
do not care who owns land. They care who pays off national debts and interest on debt. Civil war is their racket. There are no
sovereign nations. No genuine nations that create their medium of exchange publicly. No national people. Just participants in
an extortion or its victims. The "Elite" collect on money they created as loans in their central banking accounts. All others
are only human numbers assigned billing addresses.
Welcome to the New World Order ....where Multinational corporations rule & their profits are what are most important..... NOT
nation states it's the 99.9% against the .01% and they use MSM propaganda & fear to control the DUMB masses thinking
I just discovered John Batchelor Show on which Cohen has a guest spot- I just was drawn to this man's thinking, probably because
I had made up my mind about Russia during the Ukraine crises. Seeing the US has ruin every country we have gone into- I'm on Russia's
side, especially where Russia and Ukraine has a history, on that side of the world.
38:49 - Apologies for the somewhat Utopian
question here. I agree with everything Cohen has said, but regarding cause of jihadist terrorism ( ie implosion of the economies
in the region), does it make sense to discuss primarily this game of terrorist whack a mole (bombing, invading and crushing Jihadist
insurgencies)? Is there any point in talking about a pro active policy of recreating sustainable, stable economies in the region?
What would that even look like?
Not very many average Americans would be able to easily access and watch this. Average Americans still consume mainly mainstream
media. Too bad, because this lecture would have opened their eyes and have blown up their brain-contaminated minds by the CNN,
the New York Times and alike.
I agree wholeheartedly Loane. Have always been extremely impressed with and appreciative of Cohen's carefully & thoughtfully
considered contribution. We in the US have gone a bit off the deep end when it comes to this deeply embedded belief in exceptionalism
and superiority, and have been extremely rude to much of the rest of the world in the process. It amazes me how patient Russia
has been with us, waiting for us to come around to a more sober understanding of the world we live in today. I have to conclude
that what we are experiencing here in the US is a perennial phenomenon that comes with the end of all empires throughout history,
the mission creep of over-extending resources and the big one, seemingly blind hubris.
There is no chance of mending relations and even less of achieving some security partnership between US and Russia. The rift
will only keep on widening as US political and financial elites are growing increasingly desperate (and thus even more aggressive)
while Russia abandons its attempts to please the haters and moves its focus on to its future prospective partners who have genuine
interest in cooperating with Russia and achieving common goals.... including opposing the common enemy if you like! Well at least
I hope so: the only reason why US wish to get closer to Russia would be to stab it in the back... one more time!
NATO'S reason to exist ended when the Warsaw Pact was demolished. It was created to confront the socialist Warsaw Pact but
today ALL of the members of the pact are part of NATO, except Russia. So why is it still operating? Who are they confronting?
They are a bunch of bureaucrats looking for a reason to stay employed in an organization that lost its excuse to be. However,
their behavior has gone from increasing security to actually becoming a menace to trigger a nuclear war to destroy life on earth.
It will take a Republican President to turn our relationships with hostile nations around. For some irrational reasoning, the
current administration refuses negotiation with it's enemies. Somehow this is going to create understanding. and a less dangerous
world. I don't see a continuation of this Administrations policy anything but reckless . I am assuming this policy has been one
determined through Clinton, and will remain so. Clinton has said on a number of occasions, it is the Obama Administration's policies
that will be hers as well. As an ex cold warrior, who has spent a lot of time chasing Soviet boomers in the North Atlantic, I
am not willing to gamble my children and grand children's lives . It is a dangerous and ego driven pissing match. Let us start
talking , This administration and families can climb into their luxury nuclear bomb proof bunkers...... My family and most Americans
don't have that luxury.
Dr. Cohen, so Putin gave the Northern Alliance to the USA after 911 to bludgeon Afghanistan for hiding Bin Laden? Paul Craig
Robert, David Ray Griffin and a growing list of Americans believe 911 was a total bamboozle. If that is true which it looks increasingly
like it was, does that mean Putin was playing along with the our Reichstag fire? What does that make Putin? NATO should have been
totally remade after 1986, but it wasn't and we simply missed a huge opportunity not for worldwide U.S. hegemony, but for a new
umbrella of security by super powers in alliance. Obviously, the proliferation of ethno-religious groups was in Putin's mind when
he welcomed us into Afghanistan, but damn it man, tell people EXACTLY why we and the Russians want to be in the Golden Crescent
besides the extraction of minerals.
Julia Ioffe is a joke -- she is essentially a typical "national security parasite" and of the level that surprisingly, is
lower that Max Boor, although previously I thought this is impossible. Julia Ioffe is very typical of the anti-Russian thinking
in the West.
This incessant Russophobia constantly being trumpeted by the Washington militarist imperialists must stop. It's putting the
world on the brink of nuclear war.
Stephen Cohen's a godsend along with a handful of the other intellectuals out there speaking and writing the truth that penetrates
the miasma of disinformation, half-truths and exaggerations emanating from the state-corporate nexus in the American mass media.
Cohen, along with John Pilger, James Petras, Robert Parry, Michael Parenti, John Pilger, Eva Bartlett, Diana Johnstone and
Paul Craig Roberts must be read widely in order for folks to get a grasp of where the Washington imperialist ruling class is driving
the world.
at 25:40 he just destroys her totally. what
a point he made, amazing!! "thank you professor" the guy on the left wants to end Cohen's carnage of the so called experts. Cohen
made minced meat out of em. Fact after fact...stonewalled em both. Listen to her, ISIS doesn't have nuke's, she obviously doesn't
have a clue.
Cohen is always cogent and convincing. One area I wish some historian would look into is how "Russia-gate" is not echoing Cold
War themes, but echoing themes from the German Nazis in particular their belief about a great Jewish conspiracy against Europe.
Even Putin recently remarked on all these accusations: "It reminds me of anti-Semitism, A dumb man who can't do anything would
blame the Jews for everything." Look at how Putin is drawn and pictured on major outlets. The NYTimes blamed resistance to TPP
on Putin.
The Russians like the Jews are behind every social problem. Popular culture shows and speaks of Russia in the same way Nazi
propagandists wrote about Russia.
Undermining Western liberal democracies, Jews were compared to spiders catching people in the webs. Same with Putin. Pick up
Hitler's speech after the invasion of the Soviet Union justifying it., Echos? Accidental rhetoric of conspiracies ?
"to look past a long list of transgressions and abuses..." this is what I absolutely hate about America, they are all so stupid
and ignorant to their own countries misdeeds it is unbelievable, infuriating beyond belief. The US is currently fighting 7 wars
simultaneously, which it all started itself under false pretences and hid the real reason beneath a thick layer of BS propaganda
and misinformation.
The secession of Crimea is the least egregious event of the entire conflicts history. The EU and US have pumped billions of
dollars into the coup which took place weeks before the Crimean referendum, on the 20th of February 2014, 2 weeks prior to that,
an intercepted phone conversation between Victoria Nuland (Assistant Secretary of State of the United States to Europe) and Geoffrey
Pyatt (US Ambassador to the Ukraine) was leaked on February 4th, 2014. In this phone conversation, they describe key positions
within the Ukrainian government being filled by Klitshko and Yatz... fast forward a few weeks, who do we see? Klitsh and Yatz!
It was the most obvious sponsored coup in history.
Putin snatched the Crimean peninsula from NATO, who wanted to seize Russias military harbour in Sevastopol (which the Russians
have used to supply Syria, this was one and a half years before they entered the conflict directly, apart from being a very important
strategic harbour in general), by suggesting a referendum to the local government and they accepted.
Why? Because they were ethnic Russians and knew who gained power in Kiev, the neo-Nazi, Bandera-worshipping OUN, which the
US has nourished, supported and developed for the last 100 years within the Ukrainian territory. These Nazis hate Russians, they
have a deep seeded hatred of all things Russian which has been indoctrinated and drilled into them by the CIA for decades, the
first thing they did after seizing power was to demote the Russian language from the official list of languages of the Ukraine.
They have since honoured Ukrainian Nazi-collaborators from WWII by erecting statues, renaming streets, creating new holidays
etc. This is just one example of US misinformation and propaganda, nothing they say accurately describes the truth, nothing, not
one thing has it's bases in reality. Be it about Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and what have you, it's all lies and propaganda
to mask their intentions.
North Korea is another example. North Korea is a hornets nest they kick once in a while to scare the Japanese and South Koreans
into tolerating US occupation longer. Everything North Korea does is a direct response to threats and intimidations by the US.
They staged a drill off the coast of North Korea which they called "Decapitation" for F's sake.
They have ratcheted up the tension again these past few months to sneak in their THAAD weapons stations, before the new President
was chosen. And these THAAD systems have absolutely nothing to do with North Korea, it's against China and Russia, North Korea
is a pretext.
The still active war, which has merely been under a seize fire for decades, against North Korea, could have been ended before
there was colour television, but the US needs North Korea to exist in order to justify their occupation of S.Korea and Japan.
And by the way, the CrowdStrike guy testified in 2017 that there was ZERO PROOF that the Russians hacked the DNC, but Schiff
hid that for 2 years until John Ratcliff threatened to declassify it, then Schiff's sorry ass released the interviews. So, this
man was 100 percent right, there is ZERO PROOF the Russians or anyone hacked the DNC. Its a damned lie, and it was always a lie.
As usual, the journalists and leftist have nothing to offer- no facts, no forensic evidence, no truth. Only speculation hyperbole
and hysteria. I don't believe Russia are the good guys but give me a break in all this crap!
why did cohen tell everyone even potential 'terrorists' that there is too much of exactly what 'terrorists' wish to get their
hands on in the former soviet states?!!? if he is 'so afraid' of 'terrorism...' WHY did he say THAT?!!? not very bright... or
perhaps he is FOS. idk?! wth?! SMH. maybe e is trying to inform people who r not 'terrorists,' so that people know n can figure
out how to address the issues...?
Yet, for any terrorists who wanted to know how to get materials he spoke of, now they may know a region where they could potentially
go to attain the materials... maybe in 'terrorists' circles they all know this already? it just seems concerning, is all...
Beth Lemmon, 2 years ago (edited)
Love Stephen Cohen, he is spot on and right about most if not all points, he's fair, wicked smart and sober minded. However
he isn't right about POTUS Trump. If anyone has been watching this type of discourse about world geopolitics it looks like the
NWO wants wars to depopulate the earth, set up a OWG and a utopia. It's so blatantly obvious to those who are honest and not ideologically
possessed.
They recruit their stupid Antifa army and zombie possessed minions to do their dirty work in the streets. They want send our
amazing military to do the fighting wars that are just to feed the MIC, and does nothing for America's good.
Nice take on imbecilization of important and complex topics by the US MSM and politicians.
Money quote about neoliberal Dems like Obama and Biden "
But there are others for whom altruism is an alien concept.
Self-interest is all they know. These people never pause. They relentlessly press for any advantage, under any circumstances. They
see human suffering as a means to increase their power."
Another money quote: "in the hands of Democratic politicians, climate change is like systemic racism in the sky: You can't see it, but it's everywhere and
it's deadly."
Notable quotes:
"... But there are others for whom altruism is an alien concept. Self-interest is all they know. These people never pause. They relentlessly press for any advantage, under any circumstances. They see human suffering as a means to increase their power. ..."
"... Joe Biden's closest friend in the world, a prominent Martha's Vineyard kite-surfer called Barack Obama, echoed that message with his trademark restraint. Obama declawed that your "life" depends on voting for Joe Biden. ..."
"... One of the few Republicans who still hold elected office in California, state Assemblyman Heath Flora, last year called on using the state's $22 billion budget surplus to implement vegetation management. ..."
"... Fires don't spread as well without huge connected forests functioning as kindling. It's obvious, which is why it's unthinkable to mention it in some Democratic circles." ..."
TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: Massive wildfires continue to sweep across huge portions of the Pacific Northwest.
In Oregon, half a million residents have been forced to evacuate -- one out of every ten people in the state.
Dozens are dead tonight, including small children. But the fires still aren't close to contained. Watch this report from Fox's
Jeff Paul:
Video report
And it continues as we speak, walls of flame consuming everything in their path: homes, animals, human beings. Tragedy on a
massive scale.
When something this awful happens, decent people pause. They put aside their own interests for a moment. They consider how they
can help. We've seen that kind of selflessness before.
This is, remember, the anniversary of 9-11.
But there are others for whom altruism is an alien concept. Self-interest is all
they know. These people never pause. They relentlessly press for any advantage, under any circumstances. They see human suffering
as a means to increase their power.
These are the people who turn funerals into political rallies and feel no shame for doing it.
As Americans burned to death, people like this swung into action immediately. They went on television with a partisan talking
point: Climate change caused these fires, they said. They didn't explain how that happened. They just kept saying it.
In the hands of Democratic politicians, climate change is like systemic racism in the sky: you can't see it, but it's everywhere,
and it's deadly. And, like systemic racism, it's your fault: The American middle class did it. They ate too many hamburgers,
drove too many SUVs, had too many children.
A lot of them wear T-shirts to work and didn't finish college. That causes climate change too. And, worst of all, some of them
may vote for Donald Trump in November.
If there's anything that absolutely, definitively causes climate change -- and literally over a hundred percent of scientists
agree with this established fact -- it's voting for Donald Trump. You might as well start a tire fire. You're destroying the ozone
layer.
Joe Biden has checked the science, and he agrees. Yesterday, the people on Biden's staff who understand the internet tweeted out
an image of the wildfires, along with the message, "Climate change is already here -- and we're witnessing its devastating effects
every single day. We have to get President Trump out of the White House."
Again, by voting for Donald Trump, you've made hundreds of thousands of Oregonians homeless tonight. You've killed people.
Joe Biden's closest friend in the world, a prominent Martha's Vineyard kite-surfer called Barack Obama, echoed that message
with his trademark restraint. Obama declawed that your "life" depends on voting for Joe Biden.
At a time when sea levels are rising and we're about to see killer whales in the Rockies? Honestly, it doesn't seem like Obama is
overly concerned about climate change? And by the way, didn't he go to law school? When he did become a climate expert?
Those seem like good questions. But lawyers pretending to be scientists are now everywhere in the Democratic Party.
Here's the governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, a proud graduate of Willamette University law school, explaining that he's already
figured out the "cause" of the fires. Watch:
INSLEE: Fires are proof we need a stronger liberal agenda Sept 8 TRT: 18 Inslee: And these are conditions that are exacerbated
by the changing climate that we are suffering. And I do not believe that we should surrender these subdivisions or these houses
to climate change-exacerbated fires. We should fight the cause of these fires.
This is a crock. In fact, there is not a single scientist on earth who knows whether, or by how much, these fires may have been
"exacerbated" by warmer temperatures caused by "climate change," whatever that means anymore.
All we have is conjecture from a handful of scientists, none of whom have reached any definitive conclusions.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, for example, has admitted that it's, quote, "hard to determine whether climate change
played a role in sparking the fires."
Meanwhile, investigators have determined that the massive El Dorado fire in California, which has torched nearly 14,000 acres,
was caused by morons setting off some kind of fireworks. And then on Wednesday, police announced that a criminal investigation is
underway into the massive Almeda fire in Ashland, Oregon.
The sheriff there said it's too early to say what caused the fire, but he's said human remains were found at the suspected origin
point. Nothing is being ruled out, including arson.
The more you know, the more complicated it is, like everything. Serious people are just beginning to gather evidence to determine
what happened to cause this disaster.
But at the same time, unserious people are now everywhere on the media right now, drowning out nuance. Don't worry about the
facts, they say. Just trust us -- the sky orange is orange over San Francisco because households making $40,000 a year made the
mistake of voting for a Republican.
Therefore you must hand us total control of the nation's economy. Watch amateur arson detective Nancy Pelosi explain:
PELOSI: Mother Earth is angry. She's telling us, whether she's telling us with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the
west, whatever it is, the climate crisis is real and has an impact.
Mother Nature is angry. Please. When was the last time Nancy Pelosi went outside? No one asked her. All we know is what she said:
climate change caused this. Of course.
No matter the natural disaster -- hurricanes, tornadoes, whatever -- climate change did it. Keep in mind, Nancy Pelosi owns two
sub-zero freezers. They cost $10,000 apiece.
We know because she showed them off on national television. Those use a lot of energy. Like Barack Obama, she constantly flies
private between her multi-million dollar estates all over the country.
Obviously, she doesn't care about climate change. And neither do her supporters -- otherwise, they'd be trying to destroy the
mansions she owns, not the hair salons that expose her hypocrisy.
For the left, this is really about blaming and ritually humiliating the middle-class for the election of Donald Trump. Joe Biden
knows that the Pennsylvanians who would be financially ruined by his
fracking
ban
are the same Pennsylvanians who flipped the state red in 2016 for the first time in a generation.
That's the whole point. One of the reasons Joe Biden is barely allowed outside is that he has no problem showing his contempt for
the middle-class he supposedly cares so much about.
In 2019, he openly
mocked
coal miners
and suggested they just get programming jobs once they're all fired. Watch:
BIDEN: I come from a family, an area where's coal mining – in Scranton. Anybody, that can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine,
sure as hell can learn how to program as well.
Learn to code! Hilarious. Joe Biden should try it. But there isn't time. The world is ending. Last summer, Sandy Cortez [AOC] did
the math and calculated we only have
12
years left to live
.
If that sounds bad, consider this -- Just four months after that warning, Sandy Cortez tweeted that we only have 10 years to "cut
carbon emissions in half."
Think about the math here. We lost two years in just four months. At that rate, we could literally all die unless Joe Biden wins
in November. Which is of course what they're saying.
On Tuesday, California Gavin Newsom pretty much said it Newsom abandoned science long ago. Science is too stringent, too western,
too patriarchal.
Newsom is a man of faith now. He's decided
climate
change caused all of this
, and that's final. He's not listening to any other arguments. Watch:
NEWSOM: I have no patience. And I say this lovingly, not as an ideologue, but as someone who prides himself on being open to
argument, interested in evidence. But I quite literally have no patience for climate change deniers. It simply follows completely
inconsistent, that point of view, with the reality on the ground.
People like Gavin Newsom don't want to listen to any "climate change deniers." What's a "climate change denier?" Anyone who
thinks our ruling class has no idea how to run their states or protect their citizens.
Are we "climate change deniers" if we point out that California has failed to implement meaningful deforestation measures that
would have dramatically slowed the spread of these wildfires?
In 2018, a state oversight agency in California found that years of poor or nonexistent
forest
management policies
in the Sierra Nevada forests had contributed to wildfires.
One of the few Republicans who still hold elected office in California, state Assemblyman Heath Flora, last year called on
using the state's $22 billion budget surplus to implement vegetation management.
Fires don't spread as well without huge connected forests functioning as kindling. It's obvious, which is why it's
unthinkable to mention it in some Democratic circles."
Presumably, you're also a climate-change denier if you point out that six of the Oregon National Guard's wildfire-fighting
helicopters are currently in Afghanistan.
Instead of dropping water to suppress blazes, the Chinook aircraft are busy supplying a war effort that's been going on for
nearly 20 years. That seems significant. Has anyone asked Gavin Newsom or Jay Inslee about that? Do any of the Democrats who
control these states even care?
The answer, of course, is probably not. It was just last week that Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti admitted on-the-record that
his city has become completely third-world.
Of course, Garcetti didn't blame himself for this turn of events. He blamed you. Quote: "It's almost 3 p.m," Garcetti tweeted.
"Time to turn off major appliances, set the thermostat to 78 degrees (or use a fan instead, turn off excess lights and unplug any
appliances you're not using. We need every Californian to help conserve energy. Please do your part."
"Please do your part." Garcetti wants his constituents to suffer to try to solve a problem that Democrats in his state created.
Even now, as residents in Northern California are facing sweeping power outages in addition to wildfires.
In the meantime, Gavin Newsom has vowed that 50 percent of California's energy grid will be based on quote "renewable" energy
sources within a decade.
That means sources like wind and solar power -- which can't be dialed up to meet periods of extreme demand, like California is
seeing right now during its heatwave.
Newsom was asked last month whether he would consider revising this stance given the blackouts that have left millions of
Californians without power.
Newsom responded, quote, "We are going to radically change the way we produce and consume energy." In other words, The blackouts
will continue until morale improves. So will the wildfires. Get used to it.
Fox News
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In the hands of Democratic politicians, climate change is like systemic racism in the sky: You can't see it, but it's
everywhere and it's deadly.
#FoxNews
#Tucker
This is a direct result of Gavin Newsom eliminating forestation controls. Jerry Brown kept them in place, the only thing he
did correctly. Democrats are to blame for all of this.
When environmentalists pushed through their "leave forests alone, allow nature to be undisturbed" bs, California and other
states stopped clearing underbrush, also known as fire fuel and now we see a perfect example of cause and effect.
Don't get me wrong I am a conservatist , but with common sense , we can't conserve unless we protect and nurture nature to
thrive. In fact extremism in environmentalism destroys as we see. People dead, animals dead, homes destroyed, forest destroyed
because of extremism.
The narrative to leave forests alone happened long before Trump, believing otherwise makes you a useful idiot.
Congratulations.
You could Google this old narrative but will you find it, well it's Google, you have to find the people who heard and lived
the so called natural environmental push narrative, we remember and we remember the warnings. Congratulations, your ignorance
has caused harm.
"If at any time the United States believes Iran has failed to meet its commitments, no
other state can block our ability to snap back those multilateral sanctions," Pompeo
declared in a statement posted on his official Twitter account on Sunday evening.
The top US diplomat was referring to the avalanche of sanctions Washington has been hellbent
on slapping on Tehran after the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) overwhelmingly rejected
the US resolution to extend a 13-year arms embargo against the Islamic Republic past October
earlier this week.
The humiliating defeat , which saw only one member
of the 15-nation body (the Dominican Republic) siding with the US, while China and Russia
opposed the resolution, and all other nations, including France and the UK, abstained, did not
discourage Washington, which doubled down on its threat to hit Iran with biting sanctions.
... ... ...
"Of course other states can block America's ability to impose multilateral sanctions. The
US can impose sanctions by itself, but can't force others to do it," Nicholas Grossman,
teaching assistant professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Illinois,
tweeted.
"That's what 'multilateral' means. Is our SecState really this dumb?" Grossman asked.
Daniel Larison, senior editor at the American Conservative, suggested that Pompeo might
be having a hard time grasping the meaning of the word 'multilateral'.
Some argued that Pompeo could not be unaware of the contradictory nature of his statement.
Dan Murphy, former Middle East and South Asia correspondent for the Christian Science
Monitor, called it "one of the most diplomatically illiterate sentences of all time."
"I guess the end game here is [to] alienate the rest of the world even further to feed his
persecution complex?" Murphy wrote.
John Twomey, 16 August, 2020
Explanation. What Pompeo understands and what many others can't grasp is that the US
decides if their sanctions are "multilateral" because the USA speaks for all other countries
whether they like it or not.
My Opinion, 17 August, 2020
Reminiscing of his shady past as a new CIA recruit he said. "We lied, we cheated and we stole". Apparently, Mikey didn't
do all too well in his literature classes, either and that's why the most suitable candidate from zionists perspective.
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For Americans living under coronavirus restrictions, it's a question too rarely asked. In fact it's actively discouraged.
"... We are witnessing a political game of chess where the only pieces being moved are the pawns, while the king and queen sit safely on a different board. ..."
@
6:29
""There needs to be unrest in the streets as there is unrest in our lives"" When the elite oligarchy ignore peaceful
protests, you get aggressive uprisings. It's human nature and good ol' fashioned patriotism.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God
"... In a world that is increasingly confusing and awash with propaganda, Cohen's death is a
blow to humanity's desperate quest for clarity and understanding. ..."
Stephen F Cohen, the renowned American scholar on Russia and leading authority on US-Russian
relations, has died of lung cancer at the
age of 81.
As one of the precious few western voices of sanity on the subject
of Russia while everyone else has been frantically flushing their brains down the toilet,
this is a real loss. I myself have cited Cohen's expert analysis many times in my own work, and
his perspective has played a formative role in my understanding of what's really going on with
the monolithic cross-partisan manufacturing of consent for increased western aggressions
against Moscow.
In a world that is increasingly confusing and awash with propaganda, Cohen's death is a blow
to humanity's desperate quest for clarity and understanding.
I don't know how long Cohen had cancer. I don't know how long he was aware that he might not
have much time left on this earth. What I do know is he spent much of his energy in his final
years urgently trying to warn the world about the rapidly escalating danger of nuclear war,
which in our strange new reality he saw as in many ways completely unprecedented.
The last of the many books Cohen authored was 2019's
War
with Russia? , detailing his ideas on how the complex multi-front nature of the post-2016
cold
war escalations against Moscow combines with Russiagate and other factors to make it in
some ways more dangerous even than the most dangerous point of the previous cold war.
"You know it's easy to joke about this, except that we're at maybe the most dangerous moment
in US-Russian relations in my lifetime, and maybe ever," Cohen told The Young Turks in 2017. "And the reason is that we're
in a new cold war, by whatever name. We have three cold war fronts that are fraught with the
possibility of hot war, in the Baltic region where NATO is carrying out an unprecedented
military buildup on Russia's border, in Ukraine where there is a civil and proxy war between
Russia and the west, and of course in Syria, where Russian aircraft and American warplanes are
flying in the same territory. Anything could happen."
Cohen repeatedly points to the most likely cause of a future nuclear war: not one that is
planned but one which erupts in tense, complex situations where "anything could happen" in the
chaos and confusion as a result of misfire, miscommunication or technical malfunction, as
nearly
happened many times during the last cold war.
"I think this is the most dangerous moment in American-Russian relations, at least since the
Cuban missile crisis," Cohen told Democracy
Now in 2017. "And arguably, it's more dangerous, because it's more complex. Therefore, we
-- and then, meanwhile, we have in Washington these -- and, in my judgment, factless
accusations that Trump has somehow been compromised by the Kremlin. So, at this worst moment in
American-Russian relations, we have an American president who's being politically crippled by
the worst imaginable -- it's unprecedented. Let's stop and think. No American president has
ever been accused, essentially, of treason. This is what we're talking about here, or that his
associates have committed treason."
"Imagine, for example, John Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis," Cohen added. "Imagine
if Kennedy had been accused of being a secret Soviet Kremlin agent. He would have been
crippled. And the only way he could have proved he wasn't was to have launched a war against
the Soviet Union. And at that time, the option was nuclear war."
"A recurring theme of my recently published book War with Russia? is that the new Cold War
is more dangerous, more fraught with hot war, than the one we survived," Cohen wrote
last year . "Histories of the 40-year US-Soviet Cold War tell us that both sides came to
understand their mutual responsibility for the conflict, a recognition that created political
space for the constant peace-keeping negotiations, including nuclear arms control agreements,
often known as détente. But as I also chronicle in the book, today's American Cold
Warriors blame only Russia, specifically 'Putin's Russia,' leaving no room or incentive for
rethinking any US policy toward post-Soviet Russia since 1991."
"Finally, there continues to be no effective, organized American opposition to the new Cold
War," Cohen added. "This too is a major theme of my book and another reason why this Cold War
is more dangerous than was its predecessor. In the 1970s and 1980s, advocates of détente
were well-organized, well-funded, and well-represented, from grassroots politics and
universities to think tanks, mainstream media, Congress, the State Department, and even the
White House. Today there is no such opposition anywhere."
"A major factor is, of course, 'Russiagate'," Cohen continued. "As evidenced in the sources
I cite above, much of the extreme American Cold War advocacy we witness today is a mindless
response to President Trump's pledge to find ways to 'cooperate with Russia' and to the
still-unproven allegations generated by it. Certainly, the Democratic Party is not an
opposition party in regard to the new Cold War."
"Détente with Russia has always been a fiercely opposed, crisis-ridden policy
pursuit, but one manifestly in the interests of the United States and the world," Cohen
wrote in another
essay last year. "No American president can achieve it without substantial bipartisan
support at home, which Trump manifestly lacks. What kind of catastrophe will it take -- in
Ukraine, the Baltic region, Syria, or somewhere on Russia's electric grid -- to shock US
Democrats and others out of what has been called, not unreasonably, their Trump Derangement
Syndrome, particularly in the realm of American national security? Meanwhile, the Bulletin of
Atomic Scientists has recently reset its Doomsday Clock to two minutes before
midnight."
And now Stephen Cohen is dead, and that clock is inching ever closer to midnight. The
Russiagate psyop that he predicted would pressure Trump to advance dangerous cold war
escalations with no opposition from the supposed opposition party
has indeed done exactly that with nary a peep of criticism from either partisan faction of
the political/media class. Cohen has for years been correctly
predicting this chilling scenario which now threatens the life of every organism on earth,
even while his own life was nearing its end.
And now the complex cold war escalations he kept urgently warning us about have become even
more complex with the
addition of nuclear-armed China to the multiple fronts the US-centralized empire has been
plate-spinning its brinkmanship upon, and it is clear from the ramping
up of anti-China propaganda since last year that we are being prepped for those aggressions
to continue to increase.
We should heed the dire warnings that Cohen spent his last breaths issuing. We should demand
a walk-back of these insane imperialist aggressions which benefit nobody and call for
détente with Russia and China. We should begin creating an opposition to this
world-threatening flirtation with armageddon before it is too late. Every life on this planet
may well depend on our doing so.
Stephen Cohen is dead, and we are marching toward the death of everything. God help us
all.
People are just now starting to realize that possible alternate path. But the Demoncrats
in the USA must first be put down, politically euthanized, along with their neocon
never-Trump Republican partners. And that cleaning up is on the way. Trump's second term will
be the advancement of the USA-Russia initiative that is so long overdue.
PerilouseTimes , 48 minutes ago
Putin won't let western billionaires rape Russia's enormous natural resources and on top
of that Putin is against child molesters, that is what this Russia bashing is all about.
awesomepic4u , 1 hour ago
Sad to hear this.
What a good man. It is a real shame that we dont have others to stand up to this crazy pr
that is going on right now. Making peace with the world at this point is important. We dont need or
want another war and i am sure that both Europe and Russia dont want it on their turf but it
seems we keep sticking our finger in their eye. If there is another war it will be the last
war. As Einstein said, after the 3rd World War we will be using sticks and stones to fight
it.
Clint Liquor , 44 minutes ago
Cohen truly was an island of reason in a sea of insanity. Ironic that those panicked over
climate change are unconcerned about the increasing threat of Nuclear War.
thunderchief , 41 minutes ago
One of the very few level headed people on Russia.
All thats left are anti Russia-phobic nut jobs.
Send in the clowns.
Stephen Cohen isn't around to call them what they are anymore.
Eastern Whale , 55 minutes ago
cooperate with Russia
Has the US ever cooperated with anyone?
fucking truth , 3 minutes ago
That is the crux. All or nothing.
Mustafa Kemal , 49 minutes ago
Ive read several of his books. They are essential, imo, if you want to understand modern
russian history.
Normal , 1 hour ago
The bankers created the new CCP cold war.
evoila , 19 minutes ago
Max Boot is an effing idiot. Tucker wiped him clean too. It was an insult to Stephen to
even put them on the same panel.
RIP Stephen.
Gary Sick is the equivalent to Stephen, except for Iran. He too is of an era of competence
which is and will be missed as their voices are drowned out by neocon warmongers
thebigunit , 17 minutes ago
I heard Stephen Cohen a number of time in John Bachelor's podcasts.
He seemed very lucid and made a lot of sense.
He made it very clear that he thought the Democrat's "Trump - Russia collusion schtick"
was a bunch of crap.
He didn't sound like a leftie, but I'm sure he never told me the stuff he discussed with
his wife who was editor of the left wing "The Nation" magazine.
Boogity , 9 minutes ago
Cohen was a traditional old school anti-war Liberal. They're essentially extinct now with
the exception of a few such as Tulsi Gabbard and Dennis Kucinich who have both been
ostracized from the Democrat Party and the political system.
So, it appears the War on Populism is building
toward an exciting climax. All the proper pieces are in place for a Class-A GloboCap color
revolution , and maybe even civil war. You got your unauthorized Putin-Nazi president, your
imaginary apocalyptic pandemic, your violent identitarian civil unrest, your heavily-armed
politically-polarized populace, your ominous rumblings from military quarters you couldn't
really ask for much more.
OK, the plot is pretty obvious by now (as it is in all big-budget action spectacles, which
is essentially what color revolutions are), but that won't spoil our viewing experience. The
fun isn't in guessing what is going to happen. Everybody knows what's going to happen. The fun
is in watching Bruce, or Sigourney, or "the moderate rebels," or the GloboCap "Resistance,"
take down the monster, or the terrorists, or Hitler, and save the world, or democracy, or
whatever.
Trump represent new "national neoliberalism" platform and the large part of the US neoliberal elite (Clinton gang and large part
of republicans) support the return to "classic neoliberalism" at all costs.
Highly recommended!
The essence of color revolution is the combination of engineered contested election and mass organized protest and civil disobedience
via creation in neoliberal fifth column out of "professionals", especially students as well as mobilizing and put on payroll some useful
disgruntled groups which can be used as a foot soldiers, such as football hooligans. Large and systematic injection of dollars into
protest movement. All with the air cover via domination in a part or all nation's MSM.
He served as US ambassador in Chich Republic from 2011 to 2014. Based on his experience wrote that book
Democracy's Defenders published by The Brookings Institution, a neoliberal think tank, about the role of US embassy in neoliberal
revolution in Czechoslovakia (aka Velvet Revolution of 1989) which led to the dissolution of the country into two. BTW demonstrations
against police brutality were an essential part of the Velvet Revolution
Notable quotes:
"... Same tactics - color revolutions they (Soros, Nuland/Kagan, Eisen, McCain when alive) used to overthrow Orthodox countries in Eastern Europe. Belarus the latest. Ukraine (Orange, Maidan) 2014. Georgia (Rose rev). Serbia, Montenegro. Use young people who have bad sense of history and are more sympathetic to the "West." ..."
This is, without ANY question, one of Tucker's most important segments that he has ever done. IT IS EXTREMELY-RARE THAT
"""they""" ARE EXPOSED, BY-NAME, SO OPENLY AND DIRECTLY, BUT, IT HAPPENED, TONIGHT.
Please bring back Dr. Darren Beattie back. More info. on the color revolutions, Mr. Eisen, crew, and their relationship
to mail in voting fraud and their impact on the 2020 election is needed. If Mr. Eisens methods are to be used in the 2020 election
mass awareness is needed.
This is not about Trump. The endgame of the deep state is to enslave people through social division. The election is a wrestling
match for entertainment.
Sheesh, he looks scared. I hope he's being well protected now. Darren is a very brave man who is trying to tell the citizens
of the US that there is malice aforethought towards the President and this election. It is now not a choice between Republicans
or Democrats, it is a fight between good and evil. I'm sure Trump and his team are aware of the playbook and will do everything
they can to sort this, with God's help. It may get hairy, but trust the plan.
I have a feeling dems will "rig for red" to frame republicans for voter fraud, overlooking the overwhelming amount of voter
fraud in favor of Biden Harris. Causing outrage and calls to remove the President from office and saying Biden actually won.
When he really did not. Be prepared. Stay strong.
Same tactics - color revolutions they (Soros, Nuland/Kagan, Eisen, McCain when alive) used to overthrow Orthodox countries
in Eastern Europe. Belarus the latest. Ukraine (Orange, Maidan) 2014. Georgia (Rose rev). Serbia, Montenegro. Use young people
who have bad sense of history and are more sympathetic to the "West."
american people still don't know and can't understand what's happening and what their government is doing, even right now
it's happening in Belarus, it happened in Ukraine, Venezuela, Hong Kong and etc. and now it's happening in your own country,
wake up people and don't forget who's behind all this - a NGO founded by CIA called NED (National endowment for democracy),
Soros and his NGOs and the deep state.
"... Russian military leaders view the "colour revolutions" as a "new US and European approach to warfare that focuses on creating destabilizing revolutions in other states as a means of serving their security interests at low cost and with minimal casualties. ..."
"... the activities of radical public associations and groups using nationalist and religious extremist ideology, foreign and international nongovernmental organizations, and financial and economic structures, and also individuals, focused on destroying the unity and territorial integrity of the Russian Federation, destabilizing the domestic political and social situation -- including through inciting "color revolutions" -- and destroying traditional Russian religious and moral values ..."
Worldwide media use the term Colour Revolution (sometimes Coloured Revolution
) to describe various
related movements that developed in several countries of the former Soviet Union , in the People's Republic of
China and in the Balkans during the early-21st century. The term has
also been applied to a number of revolutions elsewhere, including in the Middle East and in the
Asia-Pacific region,
dating from the 1980s to the 2010s. Some observers (such as Justin Raimondo and Michael Lind ) have called the events a
revolutionary
wave , the origins of which can be traced back to the 1986 People Power Revolution (also known
as the "Yellow Revolution") in the Philippines .
Participants in colour revolutions have mostly used nonviolent resistance , also called
civil resistance .
Such methods as demonstrations, strikes and interventions have aimed to
protest against governments seen as corrupt and/or authoritarian and to advocate democracy , and they have built up
strong pressure for change.
Colour-revolution movements generally became associated with a specific colour or flower as
their symbol. The colour revolutions are notable for the important role of non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) and particularly student activists in organising creative
non-violent resistance .
Such movements have had a measure of success as for example in the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia 's Bulldozer
Revolution (2000), in Georgia 's Rose Revolution (2003) and in Ukraine 's Orange Revolution (2004). In most but not
all cases, massive street-protests followed disputed elections or requests for fair elections
and led to the resignation or overthrow of leaders regarded by their opponents as authoritarian . Some events have been called "colour revolutions", but differ from the
above cases in certain basic characteristics. Examples include Lebanon's Cedar Revolution (2005) and
Kuwait 's Blue Revolution
(2005).
Russia and China share nearly identical views that colour revolutions are the product of
machinations by the United States and other Western powers and pose a vital threat to their
public and national security.
The 1986 People Power Revolution (also
called the " EDSA " or the "Yellow"
Revolution) in the Philippines was the first successful non-violent uprising in the
contemporary period. It was the culmination of peaceful demonstrations against the
rule of
then-President Ferdinand Marcos – all of which
increased after the 1983 assassination of
opposition Senator Benigno S. Aquino,
Jr. A contested snap election on 7 February 1986 and a
call by the powerful Filipino Catholic
Church sparked mass protests across Metro Manila from 22–25 February.
The Revolution's iconic L-shaped Laban sign comes from the Filipino term for
People Power, " Lakás ng Bayan ", whose acronym is " LABAN " ("fight").
The yellow-clad protesters, later joined by the Armed Forces , ousted
Marcos and installed Aquino's widow Corazón as the country's eleventh
President, ushering in the present Fifth
Republic .
Long-standing secessionist sentiment in Bougainville eventually led to conflict with
Papua New Guinea. The inhabitants of Bougainville Island formed the Bougainville
Revolutionary Army and fought against government troops. On 20 April 1998, Papua New
Guinea ended the civil war. In 2005, Papua New Guinea gave autonomy to Bougainville.
in 1989, a peaceful demonstration by students (mostly from Charles University ) was attacked by
the police – and in time contributed to the collapse of the communist government in
Czechoslovakia.
The 'Bulldozer Revolution' in 2000, which led to the overthrow of
Slobodan Milošević . These demonstrations are usually considered to be the
first example of the peaceful revolutions which followed. However, the Serbians adopted an
approach that had already been used in parliamentary elections in Bulgaria (1997) ,
Slovakia (1998) and
Croatia (2000) ,
characterised by civic mobilisation through get-out-the-vote campaigns and unification of
the political opposition. The nationwide protesters did not adopt a colour or a specific
symbol; however, the slogan " Gotov je " (Serbian Cyrillic:
Готов је , English: He is finished
) did become an aftermath symbol celebrating the completion of the task. Despite the
commonalities, many others refer to Georgia as the most definite beginning of the series of
"colour revolutions". The demonstrations were supported by the youth movement Otpor! , some of whose members
were involved in the later revolutions in other countries.
Following the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the
Adjara
crisis (sometimes called "Second Rose Revolution" or Mini-Rose
Revolution ) led to the
exit of Chairman of the Government Aslan Abashidze from office.
Purple
Revolution was a name first used by some hopeful commentators and later picked up by
United States President George W. Bush to describe the coming of
democracy to Iraq following the 2005 Iraqi
legislative election and was intentionally used to draw the parallel with the Orange
and Rose revolutions. However, the name "purple revolution" has not achieved widespread use
in Iraq, the United States or elsewhere. The name comes from the colour that voters' index
fingers were stained to prevent fraudulent multiple voting. The term first appeared shortly
after the January 2005 election in various weblogs and editorials of individuals supportive
of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The term
received its widest usage during a visit by U.S. President George W. Bush on 24 February 2005 to
Bratislava , Slovak
Republic, for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin . Bush stated: "In recent
times, we have witnessed landmark events in the history of liberty: A Rose Revolution in
Georgia, an Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and now, a Purple Revolution in Iraq."
The Tulip
Revolution in Kyrgyzstan (also sometimes called the "Pink Revolution") was more violent
than its predecessors and followed the disputed 2005 Kyrgyz
parliamentary election . At the same time, it was more fragmented than previous
"colour" revolutions. The protesters in different areas adopted the colours pink and yellow
for their protests. This revolution was supported by youth resistance movement KelKel .
The Cedar
Revolution in Lebanon between February and April 2005 followed not a disputed election,
but rather the assassination of opposition leader Rafik Hariri in 2005. Also, instead of the
annulment of an election, the people demanded an end to the Syrian occupation of
Lebanon . Nonetheless, some of its elements and some of the methods used in the
protests have been similar enough that it is often considered and treated by the press and
commentators as one of the series of "colour revolutions". The Cedar of Lebanon is the symbol of the
country, and the revolution was named after it. The peaceful demonstrators used the colours
white and red, which are found in the Lebanese flag. The protests led to the pullout of
Syrian troops
in April 2005, ending their nearly 30-year presence there, although Syria retains some
influence in Lebanon.
Blue Revolution was a term used by some Kuwaitis to refer to
demonstrations in Kuwait in support of women's suffrage
beginning in March 2005; it was named after the colour of the signs the protesters used. In
May of that year the Kuwaiti government acceded to their demands, granting women the right
to vote beginning in the 2007 parliamentary elections. Since there was
no call for regime change, the so-called "blue revolution" cannot be categorised as a true
colour revolution.
In Belarus, there have been a number of protests against President Alexander Lukashenko , with
participation from student group Zubr . One round of
protests culminated on 25 March 2005; it was a self-declared attempt to emulate the
Kyrgyzstan revolution, and involved over a thousand citizens. However, police severely
suppressed it, arresting over 30 people and imprisoning opposition leader Mikhail Marinich .
A second, much larger, round of protests began almost a year later, on 19 March 2006,
soon after the presidential
election . Official results had Lukashenko winning with 83% of the vote; protesters
claimed the results were achieved through fraud and voter intimidation, a charge echoed
by many foreign governments.
Protesters camped out in October Square in Minsk over the next week, calling variously for
the resignation of Lukashenko, the installation of rival candidate Alaksandar
Milinkievič , and new, fair elections.
The opposition originally used as a symbol the white-red-white former flag of Belarus ; the
movement has had significant connections with that in neighbouring Ukraine, and during
the Orange Revolution some white-red-white flags were seen being waved in Kiev. During
the 2006 protests some called it the " Jeans Revolution " or "Denim
Revolution",
blue jeans being considered a symbol for freedom. Some protesters cut up jeans into
ribbons and hung them in public places. It is
claimed that Zubr was responsible for coining the phrase.
Lukashenko has said in the past: "In our country, there will be no pink or orange, or
even banana revolution." More recently he's said "They [the West] think that Belarus is
ready for some 'orange' or, what is a rather frightening option, 'blue' or ' cornflower blue '
revolution. Such 'blue' revolutions are the last thing we need". On
19 April 2005, he further commented: "All these coloured revolutions are pure and simple
banditry."
In Myanmar (unofficially called Burma), a series of anti-government protests were
referred to in the press as the Saffron Revolution
after Buddhist monks ( Theravada Buddhist monks normally
wear the colour saffron) took the vanguard of the protests. A previous, student-led
revolution, the 8888
Uprising on 8 August 1988, had similarities to the colour revolutions, but was
violently repressed.
The opposition is reported to have hoped for and urged some kind of Orange revolution,
similar to that in Ukraine, in the follow-up of the 2005 Moldovan
parliamentary elections , while the Christian
Democratic People's Party adopted orange for its colour in a clear reference to the
events of Ukraine.
A name hypothesised for such an event was "Grape Revolution" because of the abundance
of vineyards in the country; however, such a revolution failed to materialise after the
governmental victory in the elections. Many reasons have been given for this, including a
fractured opposition and the fact that the government had already co-opted many of the
political positions that might have united the opposition (such as a perceived
pro-European and anti-Russian stance). Also the elections themselves were declared fairer
in the OSCE election monitoring reports than had been the case in other countries where
similar revolutions occurred, even though the CIS monitoring mission strongly condemned
them.
Green Movement is a term widely used to describe the 2009–2010
Iranian election protests . The protests began in 2009, several years after the main
wave of colour revolutions, although like them it began due to a disputed election, the
2009 Iranian
presidential election . Protesters adopted the colour green as their symbol because it
had been the campaign colour of presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi , whom many
protesters thought had won the elections .
However Mousavi and his wife went under house arrest without any trial issued by a
court.
The Kyrgyz Revolution of 2010 in
Kyrgyzstan (also sometimes called the "Melon Revolution") led to the
exit of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev from office. The
total number of deaths should be 2,000.
Jasmine Revolution was a widely used term for the
Tunisian
Revolution . The Jasmine Revolution led to the exit of President Ben Ali from office and
the beginning of the Arab Spring .
Lotus Revolution was a term used by various western news sources to describe the
Egyptian Revolution of 2011
that forced President Mubarak to step down in 2011 as part of the Arab Spring , which followed the Jasmine
Revolution of Tunisia. Lotus is known as the flower representing resurrection, life and the
sun of ancient Egypt. It is uncertain who gave the name, while columnist of Arabic press,
Asharq Alawsat, and prominent Egyptian opposition leader Saad Eddin Ibrahim claimed to name
it the Lotus Revolution. Lotus Revolution later became common on western news source such
as CNN. Other names,
such as White Revolution and Nile Revolution, are used but are minor terms compare to Lotus
Revolution. The term Lotus Revolution is rarely, if ever, used in the Arab world.
In February 2011, Bahrain was also affected by protests in Tunisia and Egypt. Bahrain
has long been famous for its pearls and Bahrain's speciality. And there was the Pearl
Square in Manama, where the demonstrations began. The people of Bahrain were also
protesting around the square. At first, the government of Bahrain promised to reform the
people. But when their promises were not followed, the people resisted again. And in the
process, bloodshed took place (18 March 2011). After that, a small demonstration is taking
place in Bahrain.
An anti-government protest started in Yemen in 2011. The Yemeni people sought to resign
Ali Abdullah Saleh as the ruler. On 24 November, Ali Abdullah Saleh decided to transfer the
regime. In 2012, Ali Abdullah Saleh finally fled to the United States(27 February).
A call which first appeared on 17 February 2011 on the Chinese language site Boxun.com in the United States
for a "Jasmine revolution" in the People's Republic of China and repeated on social
networking sites in China resulted in blocking of internet searches for "jasmine" and a
heavy police presence at designated sites for protest such as the McDonald's in central
Beijing, one of the 13 designated protest sites, on 20 February 2011. A crowd did gather
there, but their motivations were ambiguous as a crowd tends to draw a crowd in that area.
Boxun experienced a denial of service attack
during this period and was inaccessible.
Protests started on 4 December 2011 in the capital, Moscow against the results of the parliamentary
elections, which led to the arrests of over 500 people. On 10 December, protests erupted in
tens of cities across the country; a few months later, they spread to hundreds both inside
the country and abroad. The name of the Snow Revolution derives from December - the month
when the revolution had started - and from the white ribbons the protesters wore.
Many analysts and participants of the protests against President of Macedonia Gjorge
Ivanov and the Macedonian
government refer to them as a "colourful Revolution", due to the demonstrators throwing
paint balls of different colours at government buildings in Skopje , the capital.
In 2018, a peaceful revolution was led by
member of parliament Nikol Pashinyan in opposition to the
nomination of Serzh
Sargsyan as Prime Minister of Armenia ,
who had previously served as both President of Armenia and prime
minister, eliminating term limits which would have otherwise
prevented his 2018 nomination. Concerned that Sargsyan's third consecutive term as the most
powerful politician in the government of Armenia gave him too much political influence,
protests occurred throughout the country, particularly in Yerevan , but demonstrations in solidarity with
the protesters also occurred in other countries where Armenian diaspora live.
During the
protests, Pashinyan was arrested and detained on 22 April, but he was released the
following day. Sargsyan stepped down from the position of Prime Minister, and his
Republican Party decided to
not put forward a candidate. An interim
Prime Minister was selected from Sargsyan's party until elections were held, and protests
continued for over one month. Crowd sizes in Yerevan consisted of 115,000 to 250,000 people
at a time throughout the revolution, and hundreds of protesters were arrested. Pashinyan
referred to the event as a Velvet Revolution. A vote was
held in parliament, and Pashinyan became the Prime Minister of Armenia.
Many have cited the influence of the series of revolutions which
occurred in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly the
Velvet Revolution
in Czechoslovakia in 1989. A
peaceful demonstration by students (mostly from Charles University ) was attacked by the
police – and in time contributed to the collapse of the communist government in
Czechoslovakia. Yet the roots of the pacifist floral imagery may go even further back to the
non-violent Carnation Revolution of Portugal in
April 1974, which is associated with the colour carnation because carnations were worn, and the 1986 Yellow Revolution in
the Philippines where demonstrators offered peace flowers to military personnel manning
armoured tanks.
Student movements
The first of these was Otpor! ("Resistance!") in the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia, which was founded at Belgrade University in October 1998 and
began protesting against Miloševic' during the Kosovo War . Most of them were already veterans
of anti-Milošević demonstrations such as the 1996–97 protests
and the 9 March
1991 protest . Many of its members were arrested or beaten by the police. Despite this,
during the presidential campaign in September 2000, Otpor launched its " Gotov je " (He's finished) campaign that
galvanised Serbian discontent with Miloševic' and resulted in his defeat.
Members of Otpor have inspired and trained members of related student movements including
Kmara in Georgia, Pora in
Ukraine, Zubr in Belarus and
MJAFT! in Albania. These
groups have been explicit and scrupulous in their practice of non-violent resistance as advocated
and explained in Gene
Sharp 's writings. The massive
protests that they have organised, which were essential to the successes in the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia, Georgia and Ukraine, have been notable for their colourfulness and use
of ridiculing humor in opposing authoritarian leaders.
Critical analysis
The analysis of international geopolitics scholars Paul J. Bolt and Sharyl N. Cross is that
"Moscow and Beijing share almost indistinguishable views on the potential domestic and
international security threats posed by colored revolutions, and both nations view these
revolutionary movements as being orchestrated by the United States and its Western democratic
partners to advance geopolitical ambitions."
Russian
assessment
According to Anthony Cordesman of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies , Russian military leaders view the "colour revolutions" as a "new US and
European approach to warfare that focuses on creating destabilizing revolutions in other states
as a means of serving their security interests at low cost and with minimal casualties."
Government figures in Russia , such as Defence Minister
Sergei Shoigu (in
office from 2012) and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (in office from 2004), have
characterised colour revolutions as externally-fuelled acts with a clear goal to influence the
internal affairs that destabilise the economy, conflict with the law and represent a new form of warfare. Russian President
Vladimir Putin has
stated that Russia must prevent colour revolutions: "We see what tragic consequences the wave
of so-called colour revolutions led to. For us this is a lesson and a warning. We should do
everything necessary so that nothing similar ever happens in Russia".
The 2015 presidential decree The Russian Federation's National Security Strategy (
О Стратегии
Национальной
Безопасности
Российской
Федерации ) cites "foreign sponsored
regime change" among "main threats to public and national security," including
the activities of radical public associations and groups using nationalist and religious
extremist ideology, foreign and international nongovernmental organizations, and financial
and economic structures, and also individuals, focused on destroying the unity and
territorial integrity of the Russian Federation, destabilizing the domestic political and
social situation -- including through inciting "color revolutions" -- and destroying
traditional Russian religious and moral values
Chinese view
Articles published by the Global Times , a state-run nationalist tabloid, indicate that Chinese
leaders also anticipate the Western powers, such as the United States, using "color revolutions" as a means to undermine the one-party state. An article published on 8 May 2016 claims: "A
variation of containment seeks to press China on human rights and democracy with the hope of
creating a 'color revolution.'" A 13 August 2019
article declared that the 2019 Hong Kong extradition
bill protests were a colour revolution that "aim[ed] to ruin HK 's future."
The 2015 policy white paper "China's Military Strategy" by the State Council
Information Office said that "anti-China forces have never given up their attempt to
instigate a 'color revolution' in this country."
Azerbaijan
A number of movements were created in Azerbaijan in mid-2005, inspired by the examples
of both Georgia and Ukraine. A youth group, calling itself Yox! (which means No!), declared its opposition to
governmental corruption. The leader of Yox! said that unlike Pora or Kmara , he wants to change not just the leadership,
but the entire system of governance in Azerbaijan. The Yox movement chose green as its colour.
The spearhead of Azerbaijan's attempted colour revolution was Yeni Fikir ("New Idea"), a
youth group closely aligned with the Azadlig (Freedom) Bloc of opposition political parties.
Along with groups such as Magam ("It's Time") and Dalga ("Wave"), Yeni Fikir deliberately
adopted many of the tactics of the Georgian and Ukrainian colour revolution groups, even
borrowing the colour orange from the Ukrainian revolution.
In November 2005 protesters took to the streets, waving orange flags and banners, to protest
what they considered government fraud in recent parliamentary elections. The Azerbaijani colour revolution finally fizzled out with the police riot on 26
November, during which dozens of protesters were injured and perhaps hundreds teargassed and
sprayed with water cannons.
On 5 February 2013, protests began in Shahbag and later spread to other parts of
Bangladesh following
demands for capital punishment for Abdul Quader Mollah , who had been
sentenced to life imprisonment, and for others convicted of war crimes by the International
Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh . On that
day, the International Crimes
Tribunal had sentenced Mollah to life in prison after he was convicted on five of six
counts of war crimes . Later
demands included banning the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami party
from politics including election and a boycott of institutions supporting (or affiliated with)
the party.
Protesters considered Mollah's sentence too lenient, given his crimes. Bloggers and online activists called for additional protests at Shahbag.
Tens of thousands of people joined the demonstration, which gave rise to protests across the
country.
The movement demanding trial of war criminals is a protest movement in Bangladesh, from 1972
to present.
Belarus
In Belarus , there have
been a number of protests against President Alexander Lukashenko , with
participation from student group Zubr . One round of protests
culminated on 25 March 2005; it was a self-declared attempt to emulate the Kyrgyzstan
revolution, and involved over a thousand citizens. However, police severely suppressed it,
arresting over 30 people and imprisoning opposition leader Mikhail Marinich .
A second, much larger, round of protests began almost a year later, on 19 March 2006, soon
after the presidential election
. Official results had Lukashenko winning with 83% of the vote; protesters claimed the results
were achieved through fraud and voter intimidation, a charge echoed by many foreign
governments.
Protesters camped out in October Square in Minsk over the next week, calling variously for the
resignation of Lukashenko, the installation of rival candidate Alaksandar Milinkievič ,
and new, fair elections.
The opposition originally used as a symbol the white-red-white former flag of Belarus ; the movement has had
significant connections with that in neighbouring Ukraine, and during the Orange Revolution
some white-red-white flags were seen being waved in Kiev. During the 2006 protests some called
it the " Jeans
Revolution " or "Denim Revolution", blue
jeans being considered a symbol for freedom. Some protesters cut up jeans into ribbons and hung
them in public places. It is
claimed that Zubr was responsible for coining the phrase.
Lukashenko has said in the past: "In our country, there will be no pink or orange, or even
banana revolution." More recently he's said "They [the West] think that Belarus is ready for
some 'orange' or, what is a rather frightening option, 'blue' or ' cornflower blue ' revolution. Such 'blue'
revolutions are the last thing we need". On 19
April 2005, he further commented: "All these colored revolutions are pure and simple
banditry."
In Burma (officially called Myanmar), a series of anti-government protests were referred to
in the press as the Saffron Revolution after
Buddhist monks ( Theravada Buddhist monks normally wear
the colour saffron) took the vanguard of the protests. A previous, student-led revolution, the
8888 Uprising on 8
August 1988, had similarities to the colour revolutions, but was violently
repressed.
A call which first appeared on 17 February 2011 on the Chinese language site Boxun.com in the United States for
a "Jasmine revolution" in the People's Republic of China and repeated on social networking
sites in China resulted in blocking of internet searches for "jasmine" and a heavy police
presence at designated sites for protest such as the McDonald's in central Beijing, one of the 13
designated protest sites, on 20 February 2011. A crowd did gather there, but their motivations
were ambiguous as a crowd tends to draw a crowd in that area.
Boxun experienced a denial of service attack during
this period and was inaccessible.
In the 2000s, Fiji suffered numerous coups. But at the same time, many Fiji citizens
resisted the military. In Fiji, there have been many human rights abuses by the military.
Anti-government protesters in Fiji have fled to Australia and New Zealand. In 2011, Fijians
conducted anti Fijian government protests in Australia. On 17 September
2014, the first democratic general election was held in Fiji.
In 2015, Otto
Pérez Molina , President of Guatemala, was suspected of corruption. In Guatemala City,
a large number of protests rallied. Demonstrations took place from April to September 2015.
Otto Pérez
Molina was eventually arrested on 3 September. The people of Guatemala called this event
"Guatemalan Spring".
Moldova
The opposition is reported to have hoped for and urged some kind of Orange revolution,
similar to that in Ukraine, in the follow-up of the 2005 Moldovan
parliamentary elections , while the Christian
Democratic People's Party adopted orange for its colour in a clear reference to the events
of Ukraine.
A name hypothesised for such an event was "Grape Revolution" because of the abundance of
vineyards in the country; however, such a revolution failed to materialise after the
governmental victory in the elections. Many reasons have been given for this, including a
fractured opposition and the fact that the government had already co-opted many of the
political positions that might have united the opposition (such as a perceived pro-European and
anti-Russian stance). Also the elections themselves were declared fairer in the OSCE election
monitoring reports than had been the case in other countries where similar revolutions
occurred, even though the CIS monitoring mission strongly condemned them.
On 25 March 2005, activists wearing yellow scarves held protests in the capital city of
Ulaanbaatar , disputing
the results of the 2004 Mongolian
parliamentary elections and calling for fresh elections. One of the chants heard in that
protest was "Let's congratulate our Kyrgyz brothers for their revolutionary spirit. Let's free
Mongolia of corruption."
An uprising commenced in Ulaanbaatar on 1 July 2008, with a peaceful meeting in protest of
the election of 29 June. The results of these elections were (it was claimed by opposition
political parties) corrupted by the Mongolian People's Party (MPRP).
Approximately 30,000 people took part in the meeting. Afterwards, some of the protesters left
the central square and moved to the HQ of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party –
which they attacked and then burned down. A police station was also attacked. By the night
rioters vandalised and then set fire to the Cultural Palace (which contained a theatre, museum
and National art gallery). Cars torching, bank
robberies and looting were reported. The
organisations in the burning buildings were vandalised and looted. Police used tear gas, rubber
bullets and water cannon against stone-throwing protesters. A 4-day
state of emergency was installed, the capital has been placed under a 2200 to 0800 curfew, and
alcohol sales banned, rioting not
resumed. 5 people
were shot dead by the police ,
dozens of teenagers were wounded from the police firearms and disabled and
800 people, including the leaders of the civil movements J. Batzandan, O. Magnai and B.
Jargalsakhan, were arrested. International
observers said 1 July general election was free and fair.
In 2007, the Lawyers' Movement started in Pakistan with the aim of restoration
of deposed judges. However, within a month the movement took a turn and started working towards
the goal of removing Pervez Musharraf from power.
The liberal opposition in Russia is represented by several parties and
movements.
An active part of the opposition is the Oborona youth movement. Oborona
claims that its aim is to provide free and honest elections and to establish in Russia a system
with democratic political competition. This movement under the leadership of Oleg
Kozlovsky was one of the most active and radical ones and is represented in a number of
Russian cities. During the elections of 8 September 2013, the movement contributed to the
success of Navalny in Moscow and other opposition candidates in various regions and towns
throughout Russia. The "oboronkis" also took part with other oppositional groups in protests
against fraud in the Moscow mayoral elections.
Since the 2012 protests, Aleksei Navalny mobilised with support of
the various and fractured opposition parties and masses of young people against the alleged
repression and fraud of the Kremlin apparatus. After a strong
campaign for the 8 September elections in Moscow and the regions, the opposition won remarkable
successes. Navalny reached a second place in Moscow with surprising 27% behind Kremlin-backed
Sergei Sobyanin
finishing with 51% of the votes. In other regions, opposition candidates received remarkable
successes. In the big industrial town of Yekaterinburg, opposition candidate Yevgeny Roizman received the majority
of votes and became the mayor of that town. The slow but gradual sequence of opposition
successes reached by mass protests, election campaigns and other peaceful strategies has been
recently called by observers and analysts as of Radio Free Europe "Tortoise Revolution"
in contrast to the radical "rose" or "orange" ones the Kremlin tried to prevent.
The opposition in the Republic of Bashkortostan has held protests demanding
that the federal authorities intervene to dismiss Murtaza Rakhimov from his position as
president of the republic, accusing him of leading an "arbitrary, corrupt, and violent" regime.
Airat
Dilmukhametov , one of the opposition leaders, and leader of the
Bashkir National Front , has said that the opposition movement has been inspired from the
mass protests of Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. Another
opposition leader, Marat
Khaiyirulin , has said that if an Orange Revolution were to happen in Russia, it would
begin in Bashkortostan.
From 2016 to 2017, the candlelight protest was going on in South Korea with the aim to force the ousting
of President Park
Geun-hye . Park was impeached and removed from office, and new presidential
elections were held.
In Uzbekistan , there
has been longstanding opposition to President Islam Karimov , from liberals and Islamists.
Following protests in 2005, security forces in Uzbekistan carried out the Andijan massacre that successfully
halted country-wide demonstrations. These protests otherwise could have turned into colour
revolution, according to many analysts.
The revolution in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan began in the largely ethnic Uzbek south, and
received early support in the city of Osh . Nigora
Hidoyatova , leader of the Free
Peasants opposition party, has referred to the idea of a peasant revolt or 'Cotton
Revolution'. She also said that her party is collaborating with the youth organisation
Shiddat , and that she
hopes it can evolve to an organisation similar to Kmara or Pora. Other nascent
youth organisations in and for Uzbekistan include Bolga
and the freeuzbek
group.
When groups of young people protested the closure of Venezuela's RCTV television station in June 2007, president
Hugo Chávez
said that he believed the protests were organised by the West in an attempt to promote a "soft
coup" like the revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. Similarly,
Chinese authorities claimed repeatedly in the state-run media that both the 2014 Hong Kong protests
– known as the Umbrella Revolution – as well as
the 2019–20 Hong Kong
protests , were organised and controlled by the United States.
In July 2007, Iranian state television released footage of two Iranian-American prisoners,
both of whom work for western NGOs, as part of a documentary called "In the Name of Democracy."
The documentary purportedly discusses the colour revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia and accuses
the United States of attempting to foment a similar ouster in Iran.
Other
examples and political movements around the world
The imagery of a colour revolution has been adopted by various non-revolutionary electoral
campaigns. The 'Purple Revolution' social media campaign of Naheed Nenshi catapulted his platform from 8%
to become Calgary's 36th Mayor. The platform advocated city sustainability and to inspire the
high voter turn out of 56%, particularly among young voters.
In 2015, the NDP of Alberta earned a majority
mandate and ended the 44-year-old dynasty of the Progressive
Conservatives . During the campaign Rachel Notley 's popularity gained momentum,
and the news and NDP supporters referred to this phenomenon as the "Orange Crush" per the
party's colour. NDP parodies of Orange flavoured Crush soda logo became a popular meme on
social media.
"... One NGO called the Transatlantic Democracy Working Group (TDWG) was bold or reckless enough to draw the parallels between the Color Revolution in Belarus and the events playing out against Trump explicitly ..."
"... Now, would the reader care to take a guess as to who runs the Transatlantic Democracy Working Group? If you guessed Norm Eisen, you would be correct. ..."
In our report on Never
Trump State Department official George Kent , Revolver News first drew attention
to the ominous similarities between the strategies and tactics the United States government
employs in so-called "Color Revolutions" and the coordinated efforts of government bureaucrats,
NGOs, and the media to oust President Trump.
Our recent follow-up to this initial report focused specifically on a shadowy, George Soros
linked group called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), which convened "war games"
exercises suggesting the likelihood of a "contested election scenario," and of ensuing chaos
should President Trump refuse to leave office. We further showed how these "contested election"
scenarios we are hearing so much about play perfectly into the Color Revolution framework
sketched out Revolver News' first installment in the Color Revolution series.
This third installment of Revolver News ' series exposing the Color Revolution
against Trump will focus on one quiet and indeed mostly overlooked participant in the
Transition Integrity Project's biased election "war games" exercise -- a man by the name of
Norm Eisen.
As the man who implemented the David Brock blueprint for
suing the President into paralysis and his
allies into bankruptcy , who helped mainstream and amplify the Russia Hoax, who drafted
10 articles of impeachment for the Democrats a full month before President Trump ever
called the Ukraine President in 2018 , who personally served as special counsel
litigating the Ukraine impeachment, who created a template for Internet censorship of world
leaders and a handbook for mass mobilizing racial justice protesters to overturn democratic
election results, there is perhaps no man alive with a more decorated resume for plots against
President Trump.
Indeed, the story of Norm Eisen – a key architect of nearly every attempt to
delegitimize, impeach, censor, sue and remove the democratically elected 45th President of the
United States – is a tale that winds through nearly every facet of the color revolution
playbook. There is no purer embodiment of Revolver's thesis that the very same regime
change professionals who run Color Revolutions on behalf of the US Government in order to
undermine or overthrow alleged "authoritarian" governments overseas, are running the very same
playbook to overturn Trump's 2016 victory and to pre-empt a repeat in 2020. To put it simply,
what you see is not just the same Color Revolution playbook run against Trump, but the same
people using it against Trump who have employed it in a professional capacity against targets
overseas -- same people same playbook.
In Norm Eisen's case, the "same people same playbook" refrain takes an arrestingly literal
turn when one realizes that Norm Eisen wrote a classic Color Revolution regime change manual,
and conveniently titled it "The Playbook."
Just what exactly is President Obama's former White House Ethics Czar ( yes, Norm Eisen
was Obama's ethics Czar ), his longtime friend since Harvard Law School, who recently
partook in war games to simulate overturning a Trump electoral victory, doing writing a
detailed playbook on how to use a Color Revolution to overthrow governments? The story of Norm
Eisen only gets more fascinating, outrageous, and indispensable to understanding the planned
chaos unfolding before our eyes, leading up to what will perhaps be the most chaotic election
in our nation's recent history.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -
"I'd Rather Have This Book Than The Atomic Bomb"
Before we can fully appreciate the significance of Norm Eisen's Color Revolution manual "The
Playbook," we must contextualize this important book in relation to its place in Color
Revolution literature.
As a bit of a refresher to the reader, it is important to emphasize that when we use the
term "Color Revolution" we do not mean any general type of revolution -- indeed, one of the
chief advantages of the Color Revolution framework we advance is that it offers a specific and
concrete heuristic by which to understand the operations against Trump beyond the accurate but
more vague term "coup." Unlike the overt, blunt, method of full scale military invasion as was
the case in Iraq War, a Color Revolution employs the following strategies and tactics:
A "Color Revolution" in this context refers to a specific type of coordinated attack that
the United States government has been known to deploy against foreign regimes, particularly
in Eastern Europe deemed to be "authoritarian" and hostile to American interests. Rather than
using a direct military intervention to effect regime change as in Iraq, Color Revolutions
attack a foreign regime by contesting its electoral legitimacy, organizing mass protests and
acts of civil disobedience, and leveraging media contacts to ensure favorable coverage to
their agenda in the Western press.
[Revolver]
This combination of tactics used in so-called Color Revolutions did not come from nowhere.
Before Norm Eisen came Gene Sharp -- originator and Godfather of the Color Revolution model
that has been a staple of US Government operations externally (and now internally) for decades.
Before Norm Eisen's "Playbook" there was Gene Sharp's classic "From Dictatorship to Democracy,"
which might be justly described as the Bible of the Color Revolution. Such is the power of the
strategies laid out by Sharp that a Lithuanian defense minister once said of Sharp's preceding
book (upon which Dictatorship to Democracy builds) that "I would
rather have this book than the nuclear bomb."
Gene Sharp
It would be impossible to do full justice to Gene Sharp within the scope of this specific
article. Here are some choice excerpts about Sharp and his biography to give readers a taste of
his significance and relevance to this discussion.
Gene Sharp, the "Machiavelli of nonviolence," has been fairly described as "the most
influential American political figure you've never heard of."
1 Sharp, who passed away in January 2018, was a beloved yet "mysterious" intellectual
giant of nonviolent protest movements , the "father of the whole field of the study of
strategic nonviolent action."
2 Over his career, he wrote more than twenty books about nonviolent action and social
movements. His how-to pamphlet on nonviolent revolution, From Dictatorship to
Democracy , has been translated into over thirty languages and is cited by protest
movements around the world . In the U.S., his ideas are widely promoted through activist
training programs and by scholars of nonviolence, and have been used by nearly every major
protest movement in the last forty years .
3 For these contributions, Sharp has been praised by progressive heavyweights like Howard
Zinn and Noam Chomsky, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize four times, compared to Gandhi,
and cast as a lonely prophet of peace, champion of the downtrodden, and friend of the left .
4
Gene Sharp's influence on the U.S. activist left and social movements abroad has been
significant. But he is better understood as one of the most important U.S. defense
intellectuals of the Cold War, an early neoliberal theorist concerned with the supposedly
inherent violence of the "centralized State," and a quiet but vital counselor to
anti-communist forces in the socialist world from the 1980s onward.
In the mid-1960s, Thomas Schelling, a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear theorist, recruited
29-year-old Sharp to join the Center for International Affairs at Harvard , bastion of the
high Cold War defense, intelligence, and security establishment. Leading the so-called "CIA
at Harvard" were Henry Kissinger, future National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and future
CIA chief Robert Bowie. Sharp held this appointment for thirty years. There, with Department
of Defense funds, he developed his core theory of nonviolent action: a method of warfare
capable of collapsing states through theatrical social movements designed to dissolve the
common will that buttresses governments, all without firing any shots. From his post at the
CIA at Harvard, Sharp would urge U.S. and NATO defense leadership to use his methods against
the Soviet Union. [Nonsite]
We invite the reader to reflect on the passages in bold, particularly their potential
relevance to the current domestic situation in the United States. Sharp's book and strategy for
"non violent revolution" AKA "peaceful protests" has been used to undermine or overthrow target
governments all over the world, particularly in Eastern Europe.
Gene's color revolution playbook was of course especially effective in Eastern Bloc
countries in Eastern Europe:
Finally, there is no shortage of analysis as to the applicability of Sharp's methods
domestically within the USA in order to advance various left wing causes. This passage
specifically mentions the applicability of Sharp's methods to counter act Trump.
Ominous stuff indeed. For readers who wish to read further, please consult
the full Politico piece from which we have excerpted the above highlighted passages. There
is also a fascinating documentary on Sharp instructively titled "
How to Start a Revolution ."
This is all interesting and disturbing, to say the least. In its own right it would suggest
a compelling nexus point between the operations run against Trump and the Color Revolution
playbook. But what does this have to do with our subject Norm Eisen? It just so happens that
Eisen explicitly places himself in the tradition of Gene Sharp, acknowledging his book "The
Playbook" as a kind of update to Sharp's seminal "Dictatorship to Democracy."
And there we have it, folks -- Norm Eisen, former Obama Ethics Czar, Ambassador to
Czechoslovakia during the "Velvet Revolution," key counsel in impeachment effort against Trump,
and participant in the ostensibly bi-partisan election war games predicting a contested
election scenario unfavorable to Trump -- just happens to be a Color Revolution expert who
literally wrote the modern "Playbook" in the explicitly acknowledged tradition of Color
Revolution Godfather Gene Sharp's "From Dictatorship to Democracy."
Before we turn to the contents of Norm Eisen's Color Revolution manual, full title "The
Democracy Playbook: Preventing and Reversing Democratic Backsliding," it will be useful to make
a brief point regarding the term "democracy" itself, which happens to appear in the title of
Gene Sharp's book "From Dictatorship to Democracy" as well.
Just like the term "peaceful protestor," which, as we pointed out in our George Kent essay
is used as a term of craft in the Color Revolution context, so is the term "democracy" itself.
The US Government launches Color Revolutions against foreign targets irrespective of whether
they actually enjoy the support of the people or were elected democratically. In the case of
Trump, whatever one says about him, he is perhaps the most "democratically" elected President
in America's history. Indeed, in 2016 Trump ran against the coordinated opposition of the
establishments of both parties, the military industrial complex, the corporate media,
Hollywood, and really every single powerful institution in the country. He won, however,
because he was able to garner sufficient support of the people -- his true and decisive power
base as a "populist." Precisely because of the ultra democratic "populist" character of Trump's
victory, the operatives attempting to undermine him have focused specifically on attacking the
democratic legitimacy of his victory.
In this vein we ought to note that the term "democratic backsliding," as seen in the
subtitle of Norm Eisen's book, and its opposite "democratic breakthrough" are also terms of art
in the Color Revolution lexicon. We leave the full exploration of how the term "democratic" is
used deceptively in the Color Revolution context (and in names of decidedly
anti-democratic/populist institutions) as an exercise to the interested reader. Michael McFaul,
another Color Revolution expert and key anti-Trump operative somewhat gives the game away in
the following tweet in which the term "democratic breakthrough" makes an appearance as a better
sounding alternative to "Color Revolution:"
Most likely as a response to Revolver News' first Color Revolution article on State
Department official George Kent, former Ambassador McFaul issued the following tweet as a
matter of damage control:
Being a rather simple man from a simple background, McFaul perhaps gave too much of this
answer away in the following explanation (now deleted).
Trump has lost the Intelligence Community. He has lost the State Department. He has lost the military. How can he continue to
serve as our Commander in Chief ?
With this now-deleted tweet we get a clearer picture of the power bases that must be
satisfied for a "democratic breakthrough" to occur -- and conveniently enough, not one of them
is subject to direct democratic control. McFaul, Like Eisen, George Kent, and so many others,
perfectly embodies Revolver's thesis regarding the Color Revolution being the same
people running the same playbook. Indeed, like most of the star never-Trump impeachment
witnesses, McFaul has been an ambassador to an Eastern European country. He has supported
operations against Trump, including impeachment. And, like Norm Eisen, he has actually
written
a book on Color Revolutions (more on that later).
Norm Eisen's The Democracy Playbook: A Brief Overview:
A deep dive into Eisen's book would exceed the scope of this relatively brief exposé.
It is nonetheless important for us to draw attention to key passages of Eisen's book to
underscore how closely the "Playbook" corresponds to events unfolding right here at home.
Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that regime change professionals such as Eisen
simply decided to run the same playbook against Trump that they have done countless times when
foreign leaders are elected overseas that they don't like and want to remove via
extra-democratic means -- "peaceful protests," "democratic breakthroughs" and such.
First, consider the following passage from Eisen's Playbook:
If you study this passage closely, you will find direct confirmation of our earlier point
that "democracy" in the Color Revolution context is a term of art -- it refers to anything they
like that keeps the national security bureaucrats in power. Anything they don't like, even if
elected democratically, is considered "anti-democratic," or, put another way, "democratic
backsliding." Eisen even acknowledges that this scourge of populism he's so worried about
actually was ushered in with "popular support," under "relatively democratic and electoral
processes." The problem is precisely that the people have had enough of the corrupt ruling
class ignoring their needs. Accordingly, the people voted first for Brexit and then for Donald
Trump -- terrifying expressions of populism which the broader Western power structure did
everything in its capacity to prevent. Once they failed, they viewed these twin populist
victories as a kind of political 9/11 to be prevented by any means necessary from recurring.
Make no mistake, the Color Revolution has nothing to do with democracy in any meaningful sense
and everything to do with the ruling class ensuring that the people will never have the power
to meddle in their own elections again.
The passage above can be insightfully compared to the passage in Gene Sharp's book noting
ripe applications to the domestic situation.
It is instructive to compare the passage in Eisen's Color Revolution book to the passage in
Michael McFaul's Color Revolution book
First off, it is absolutely imperative to look at every single one of the conditions for a
Color Revolution that McFaul identifies. It is simply impossible not to be overcome with the
ominous parallels to our current situation. Specifically, however, note condition 1 which
refers to having a target leader who is not fully authoritarian, but semi-autocratic. This
coincides perfectly well with Eisen's concession that the populist leaders he's so concerned
about might be "illiberal" but enjoy "popular support" and have come to power via "relatively
democratic electoral processes."
Consulting the above passage from McFaul's book, we note that McFaul has been perhaps the
most explicit about the conditions which facilitate a Color Revolution. We invite the reader to
supply the contemporary analogue to each point as a kind of exercise.
A semi-autocratic regime rather than fully autocratic
An unpopular incumbent (note blanket negative coverage of Trump, fake polls)
A united and organized opposition (media, intel community, Hollywood, community groups,
etc)
Enough independent media to inform citizens of falsified vote (see full court press in
media pushing contested election narrative, social media censorship)
A political opposition capable of mobilizing tens of thousands or more demonstrators to
protest electoral fraud ( SEE BLACK LIVES MATTER AND ANTIFA )
On point number four, which is especially relevant to our present situation, Eisen has an
interesting thing to say about the role of a contested election scenario in the Orange
Revolution, arguably the most important Color Revolution of them all.
Finally, let's look at one last passage from Norm Eisen's Color Revolution "Democracy
Playbook" and cross-reference it with McFaul's conditions for a Color Revolution as well as the
situation playing out right now before our very eyes:
A few things immediately jump out at us. First, the ominous instruction: "prepare to use
electoral abuse evidence as the basis for reform advocacy." Secondly, we note the passage
suggesting that opposition to a target leader might avail itself of "extreme institutional
measures" including impeachment processes, votes of no confidence, and, of course, the good
old-fashioned "protests, strikes, and boycotts" (all more or less peaceful no doubt).
By now the Color Revolution agenda against Trump should be as plain as day. Regime change
professionals like McFaul, Eisen, George Kent, and others, who have refined their craft
conducting color revolutions overseas, have taken it upon themselves to use the same tools, the
same tactics -- quite literally, the same playbook -- to overthrow President Trump. Yet again,
same people, same playbook.
We conclude this study of key Color Revolution figure Norm Eisen by exploring his
particularly proactive -- indeed central role -- in effecting one of the Color Revolution's
components mentioned in the Eisen Playbook -- impeachment.
-- -- -- –
The Ghost of Democracy's Future
We mentioned at the outset of this piece that Norm Eisen is many things -- a former Obama
Ethics Czar (but of course), Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, participant in the now notorious
Transition Integrity Project, et cetera. But he earned his title as "legal hatchet man" of the
Color Revolution for his tireless efforts in promoting the impeachment of President Trump.
The litany of Norm Eisen's legal activity cited at the beginning of this piece bears
repeating.
As the man who implemented the David Brock blueprint
for suing the President into paralysis and his
allies into bankruptcy , who helped mainstream and amplify the Russia Hoax, who drafted
10 articles of impeachment for the Democrats a full month before President Trump ever
called the Ukraine President in 2018 , who personally served as DNC co-counsel for
litigating the Ukraine impeachment
If that resume doesn't warrant the title "legal hatchet man" we wonder what does? We
encourage interested readers or journalists to explore those links for themselves. By way of
conclusion, it simply suffices to note that much of Eisen's impeachment activity he conducted
before there was any discussion or knowledge of President Trump's call to the Ukrainian
President in 2018 -- indeed before the call even happened. Impeachment was very clearly a
foregone conclusion -- a quite literal part of Norm Eisen's Color Revolution playbook -- and it
was up to people like Eisen to find the pretext, any pretext.
Despite their constant invocation of "democracy" we ought to note that transferring the
question of electoral outcomes to adversarial legal processes is in fact anti-Democratic -- in
keeping with our observation that the Color Revolution playbook uses "democracy" as a term of
art, often meaning the precise opposite of the usual meaning suggesting popular support.
Perhaps the most important entry in Eisen's entry is the first, that is, Eisen's
participation in the infamous David Brock blueprint on how to undermine and overthrow the Trump
presidency.
The Washington Free Beacon attended the retreat and obtained David Brock's
private and confidential memorandum from the meeting. The memo, "
Democracy Matters: Strategic Plan for Action ," outlines Brock's four-year agenda to
attack Trump and Republicans using Media Matters, American Bridge, Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) , and Shareblue.
This leaked memo was written before President Trump took office, further suggesting that all
of the efforts to undermine Trump have not been good faith responses to his behavior, but a
pre-ordained attack strategy designed to overturn the 2016 election by any means necessary. The
Color Revolution expert who suggests impeachment as a tactic in his Color Revolution "playbook"
was already in charge of impeachment before Trump even took office -- -Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is run by none other than Norm Eisen.
But the attempt to overturn the 2016 election using Color Revolution tactics failed. And so
now the plan is to overthrow Trump in 2020, hence Norm Eisen's noted participation in the
Transition Integrity Project. Looking around us, one is forced to ask the deeply uncomfortable
question, "transition into what?"
To conclude, we would like to call back to a point we raised in the first piece in our color
revolution series. In this piece, we noted that star Never Trump impeachment witness George
Kent just happens to be running the Belarus desk at the State Department. Belarus, we argued,
with its mass demonstrations egged on by US Government backed NGOS, its supposed "peaceful
protests" and of course its contested election results all fit the Color Revolution mold
curiously enough.
One NGO called the Transatlantic Democracy Working Group (TDWG) was bold or reckless enough
to draw the parallels between the Color Revolution in Belarus and the events playing out
against Trump explicitly. In response to a remark by a twitter user that the TDWG's remarks
about Belarus suggested parallels to the United States, the TDWG ominously replied:
Now, would the reader care to take a guess as to who runs the Transatlantic Democracy
Working Group? If you guessed Norm Eisen, you would be correct.
Stay tuned for more in Revolver.news' groundbreaking coverage of the Color
Revolution against Trump. Be sure to check out the previous installments in this series.
"... these "contested election" scenarios we are hearing so much about play perfectly into the Color Revolution framework sketched out Revolver News' first installment in the Color Revolution series. ..."
"... the man who implemented the David Brock blueprint for suing the President into paralysis and his allies into bankruptcy, who helped mainstream and amplify the Russia Hoax, who drafted 10 articles of impeachment for the Democrats a full month before President Trump ever called the Ukraine President in 2018, who personally served as special counsel litigating the Ukraine impeachment, who created a template for Internet censorship of world leaders and a handbook for mass mobilizing racial justice protesters to overturn democratic election results, there is perhaps no man alive with a more decorated resume for plots against President Trump. ..."
"... Indeed, the story of Norm Eisen – a key architect of nearly every attempt to delegitimize, impeach, censor, sue and remove the democratically elected 45th President of the United States ..."
"... In Norm Eisen's case, the "same people same playbook" refrain takes an arrestingly literal turn when one realizes that Norm Eisen wrote a classic Color Revolution regime change manual, and conveniently titled it "The Playbook." ..."
In our report on Never Trump State Department official George Kent, Revolver News first
drew attention to the ominous similarities between the strategies and tactics the United
States government employs in so-called "Color Revolutions" and the coordinated efforts of
government bureaucrats, NGOs, and the media to oust President Trump.
Our recent follow-up to this initial report focused specifically on a shadowy, George
Soros linked group called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), which convened "war games"
exercises suggesting the likelihood of a "contested election scenario," and of ensuing chaos
should President Trump refuse to leave office. We further showed how these "contested election" scenarios we are hearing
so much about play perfectly into the Color Revolution framework sketched out Revolver News' first installment in the Color
Revolution series.
This third installment of Revolver News' series exposing the Color Revolution against
Trump will focus on one quiet and indeed mostly overlooked participant in the Transition
Integrity Project's biased election "war games" exercise -- a man by the name of Norm
Eisen.
As the man who implemented the David Brock blueprint for suing the President into
paralysis and his allies into bankruptcy, who helped mainstream and amplify the Russia Hoax,
who drafted 10 articles of impeachment for the Democrats a full month before President Trump
ever called the Ukraine President in 2018, who personally served as special counsel
litigating the Ukraine impeachment, who created a template for Internet censorship of world
leaders and a handbook for mass mobilizing racial justice protesters to overturn democratic
election results, there is perhaps no man alive with a more decorated resume for plots
against President Trump.
Indeed, the story of Norm Eisen – a key architect of nearly every attempt to
delegitimize, impeach, censor, sue and remove the democratically elected 45th President of
the United States – is a tale that winds through nearly every facet of the color
revolution playbook. There is no purer embodiment of Revolver's thesis that the very same
regime change professionals who run Color Revolutions on behalf of the US Government in order
to undermine or overthrow alleged "authoritarian" governments overseas, are running the very
same playbook to overturn Trump's 2016 victory and to pre-empt a repeat in 2020. To put
it simply, what you see is not just the same Color Revolution playbook run against Trump, but
the same people using it against Trump who have employed it in a professional capacity
against targets overseas -- same people same playbook.
In Norm Eisen's case, the "same people same playbook" refrain takes an arrestingly
literal turn when one realizes that Norm Eisen wrote a classic Color Revolution regime change
manual, and conveniently titled it "The Playbook."
Just what exactly is President Obama's former White House Ethics Czar (yes, Norm Eisen was
Obama's ethics Czar), his longtime friend since Harvard Law School, who recently partook in
war games to simulate overturning a Trump electoral victory, doing writing a detailed
playbook on how to use a Color Revolution to overthrow governments? The story of Norm Eisen
only gets more fascinating, outrageous, and indispensable to understanding the planned chaos
unfolding before our eyes, leading up to what will perhaps be the most chaotic election in
our nation's recent history.
... ... ...
A deep dive into Eisen's book would exceed the scope of this relatively brief exposé.
It is nonetheless important for us to draw attention to key passages of Eisen's book to
underscore how closely the "Playbook" corresponds to events unfolding right here at home. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that regime change professionals such as
Eisen simply decided to run the same playbook against Trump that they have done countless
times when foreign leaders are elected overseas that they don't like and want to remove via
extra-democratic means -- "peaceful protests," "democratic breakthroughs" and such. ... ... ...
Ominous stuff indeed. For readers who wish to read further, please consult
the full Politico piece from which we have excerpted the above highlighted passages. There
is also a fascinating documentary on Sharp instructively titled "
How to Start a Revolution ."
This is all interesting and disturbing, to say the least. In its own right it would suggest
a compelling nexus point between the operations run against Trump and the Color Revolution
playbook. But what does this have to do with our subject Norm Eisen? It just so happens that
Eisen explicitly places himself in the tradition of Gene Sharp, acknowledging his book "The
Playbook" as a kind of update to Sharp's seminal "Dictatorship to Democracy."
And there we have it, folks -- Norm Eisen, former Obama Ethics Czar, Ambassador to
Czechoslovakia during the "Velvet Revolution," key counsel in impeachment effort against Trump,
and participant in the ostensibly bi-partisan election war games predicting a contested
election scenario unfavorable to Trump -- just happens to be a Color Revolution expert who
literally wrote the modern "Playbook" in the explicitly acknowledged tradition of Color
Revolution Godfather Gene Sharp's "From Dictatorship to Democracy."
Before we turn to the contents of Norm Eisen's Color Revolution manual, full title "The
Democracy Playbook: Preventing and Reversing Democratic Backsliding," it will be useful to make
a brief point regarding the term "democracy" itself, which happens to appear in the title of
Gene Sharp's book "From Dictatorship to Democracy" as well.
Just like the term "peaceful protestor," which, as we pointed out in our George Kent essay
is used as a term of craft in the Color Revolution context, so is the term "democracy" itself.
The US Government launches Color Revolutions against foreign targets irrespective of whether
they actually enjoy the support of the people or were elected democratically. In the case of
Trump, whatever one says about him, he is perhaps the most "democratically" elected President
in America's history. Indeed, in 2016 Trump ran against the coordinated opposition of the
establishments of both parties, the military industrial complex, the corporate media,
Hollywood, and really every single powerful institution in the country. He won, however,
because he was able to garner sufficient support of the people -- his true and decisive power
base as a "populist." Precisely because of the ultra democratic "populist" character of Trump's
victory, the operatives attempting to undermine him have focused specifically on attacking the
democratic legitimacy of his victory.
In this vein we ought to note that the term "democratic backsliding," as seen in the
subtitle of Norm Eisen's book, and its opposite "democratic breakthrough" are also terms of art
in the Color Revolution lexicon. We leave the full exploration of how the term "democratic" is
used deceptively in the Color Revolution context (and in names of decidedly
anti-democratic/populist institutions) as an exercise to the interested reader. Michael McFaul,
another Color Revolution expert and key anti-Trump operative somewhat gives the game away in
the following tweet in which the term "democratic breakthrough" makes an appearance as a better
sounding alternative to "Color Revolution:"
Most likely as a response to Revolver News' first Color Revolution article on State
Department official George Kent, former Ambassador McFaul issued the following tweet as a
matter of damage control:
With this now-deleted tweet we get a clearer picture of the power bases that must be
satisfied for a "democratic breakthrough" to occur -- and conveniently enough, not one of them
is subject to direct democratic control. McFaul, Like Eisen, George Kent, and so many others,
perfectly embodies Revolver's thesis regarding the Color Revolution being the same
people running the same playbook. Indeed, like most of the star never-Trump impeachment
witnesses, McFaul is or has been an ambassador to an Eastern European country. He has supported
operations against Trump, including impeachment. And, like Norm Eisen, he has actually
written
a book on Color Revolutions (more on that later).
Norm Eisen's The Democracy Playbook: A Brief Overview:
A deep dive into Eisen's book would exceed the scope of this relatively brief exposé.
It is nonetheless important for us to draw attention to key passages of Eisen's book to
underscore how closely the "Playbook" corresponds to events unfolding right here at home.
Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that regime change professionals such as Eisen
simply decided to run the same playbook against Trump that they have done countless times when
foreign leaders are elected overseas that they don't like and want to remove via
extra-democratic means -- "peaceful protests," "democratic breakthroughs" and such.
First, consider the following passage from Eisen's Playbook:
If you study this passage closely, you will find direct confirmation of our earlier point
that "democracy" in the Color Revolution context is a term of art -- it refers to anything they
like that keeps the national security bureaucrats in power. Anything they don't like, even if
elected democratically, is considered "anti-democratic," or, put another way, "democratic
backsliding." Eisen even acknowledges that this scourge of populism he's so worried about
actually was ushered in with "popular support," under "relatively democratic and electoral
processes." The problem is precisely that the people have had enough of the corrupt ruling
class ignoring their needs. Accordingly, the people voted first for Brexit and then for Donald
Trump -- terrifying expressions of populism which the broader Western power structure did
everything in its capacity to prevent. Once they failed, they viewed these twin populist
victories as a kind of political 9/11 to be prevented by any means necessary from recurring.
Make no mistake, the Color Revolution has nothing to do with democracy in any meaningful sense
and everything to do with the ruling class ensuring that the people will never have the power
to meddle in their own elections again.
The passage above can be insightfully compared to the passage in Gene Sharp's book noting
ripe applications to the domestic situation.
It is instructive to compare the passage in Eisen's Color Revolution book to the passage in
Michael McFaul's Color Revolution book:
First off, it is absolutely imperative to look at every single one of the conditions for a
Color Revolution that McFaul identifies. It is simply impossible not to be overcome with the
ominous parallels to our current situation. Specifically, however, note condition 1 which
refers to having a target leader who is not fully authoritarian, but semi-autocratic. This
coincides perfectly well with Eisen's concession that the populist leaders he's so concerned
about might be "illiberal" but enjoy "popular support" and have come to power via "relatively
democratic electoral processes."
Consulting the above passage from McFaul's book, we note that McFaul has been perhaps the
most explicit about the conditions which facilitate a Color Revolution. We invite the reader to
supply the contemporary analogue to each point as a kind of exercise.
A semi-autocratic regime rather than fully autocratic
An unpopular incumbent (note blanket negative coverage of Trump, fake polls)
A united and organized opposition (media, intel community, Hollywood, community
groups, etc)
Enough independent media to inform citizens of falsified vote (see full court press
in media pushing contested election narrative, social media censorship)
A political opposition capable of mobilizing tens of thousands or more demonstrators
to protest electoral fraud ( SEE BLACK LIVES MATTER AND ANTIFA )
On point number four , which is especially relevant to our present situation, Eisen has an
interesting thing to say about the role of a contested election scenario in the Orange
Revolution, arguably the most important Color Revolution of them all.
Finally, let's look at one last passage from Norm Eisen's Color Revolution "Democracy
Playbook" and cross-reference it with McFaul's conditions for a Color Revolution as well as the
situation playing out right now before our very eyes:
A few things immediately jump out at us. First, the ominous instruction: "prepare to use
electoral abuse evidence as the basis for reform advocacy." Secondly, we note the passage
suggesting that opposition to a target leader might avail itself of "extreme institutional
measures" including impeachment processes, votes of no confidence, and, of course, the good
old-fashioned "protests, strikes, and boycotts" (all more or less peaceful no doubt).
By now the Color Revolution agenda against Trump should be as plain as day. Regime change
professionals like McFaul, Eisen, George Kent, and others, who have refined their craft
conducting color revolutions overseas, have taken it upon themselves to use the same tools, the
same tactics -- quite literally, the same playbook -- to overthrow President Trump. Yet again,
same people, same playbook.
We conclude this study of key Color Revolution figure Norm Eisen by exploring his
particularly proactive -- indeed central role -- in effecting one of the Color Revolution's
components mentioned in the Eisen Playbook -- impeachment.
__________
The Ghost of Democracy's Future
We mentioned at the outset of this piece that Norm Eisen is many things -- a former Obama
Ethics Czar (but of course), Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, participant in the now notorious
Transition Integrity Project, et cetera. But he earned his title as "legal hatchet man" of the
Color Revolution for his tireless efforts in promoting the impeachment of President Trump.
The litany of Norm Eisen's legal activity cited at the beginning of this piece bears
repeating.
As the man who implemented the David Brock blueprint
for suing the President into paralysis and his
allies into bankruptcy , who helped mainstream and amplify the Russia Hoax, who drafted
10 articles of impeachment for the Democrats a full month before President Trump ever
called the Ukraine President in 2018 , who personally served as DNC co-counsel for
litigating the Ukraine impeachment
If that resume doesn't warrant the title "legal hatchet man" we wonder what does? We
encourage interested readers or journalists to explore those links for themselves. By way of
conclusion, it simply suffices to note that much of Eisen's impeachment activity he conducted
before there was any discussion or knowledge of President Trump's call to the Ukrainian
President in 2018 -- indeed before the call even happened. Impeachment was very clearly a
foregone conclusion -- a quite literal part of Norm Eisen's Color Revolution playbook -- and it
was up to people like Eisen to find the pretext, any pretext.
Despite their constant invocation of "democracy" we ought to note that transferring the
question of electoral outcomes to adversarial legal processes is in fact anti-Democratic -- in
keeping with our observation that the Color Revolution playbook uses "democracy" as a term of
art, often meaning the precise opposite of the usual meaning suggesting popular support.
Perhaps the most important entry in Eisen's entry is the first, that is, Eisen's
participation in the infamous David Brock blueprint on how to undermine and overthrow the Trump
presidency.
The Washington Free Beacon attended the retreat and obtained David Brock's private
and confidential memorandum from the meeting. The memo, "
Democracy Matters: Strategic Plan for Action ," outlines Brock's four-year agenda to
attack Trump and Republicans using Media Matters, American Bridge, Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) , and Shareblue.
This leaked memo was written before President Trump took office, further suggesting that all
of the efforts to undermine Trump have not been good faith responses to his behavior, but a
pre-ordained attack strategy designed to overturn the 2016 election by any means necessary. The
Color Revolution expert who suggests impeachment as a tactic in his Color Revolution "playbook"
was already in charge of impeachment before Trump even took office -- -Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is run by none other than Norm Eisen.
But the attempt to overturn the 2016 election using Color Revolution tactics failed. And so
now the plan is to overthrow Trump in 2020, hence Norm Eisen's noted participation in the
Transition Integrity Project. Looking around us, one is forced to ask the deeply uncomfortable
question, "transition into what?"
To conclude, we would like to call back to a point we raised in the first piece in our color
revolution series. In this piece, we noted that star Never Trump impeachment witness George
Kent just happens to be running the Belarus desk at the State Department. Belarus, we argued,
with its mass demonstrations egged on by US Government backed NGOS, its supposed "peaceful
protests" and of course its contested election results all fit the Color Revolution mold
curiously enough.
One NGO called the Transatlantic Democracy Working Group (TDWG) was bold or reckless enough
to draw the parallels between the Color Revolution in Belarus and the events playing out
against Trump explicitly. In response to a remark by a twitter user that the TDWG's remarks
about Belarus suggested parallels to the United States, the TDWG ominously replied:
Now, would the reader care to take a guess as to who runs the Transatlantic Democracy
Working Group? If you guessed Norm Eisen, you would be correct.
Stay tuned for more in Revolver.news' groundbreaking coverage of the Color Revolution
against Trump. Be sure to check out the previous installments in this series:
The QT has referenced "the playbook" (uncapitalized) several times. Don't know if they are
pointing to Eisen's book, or the "Nazi" playbook. Whichever one it is, probably both, the
legitimate question can be asked:
* Note what word is being defined in the dictionary link.
If interested in seeing what QT is referencing in regards to "the playbook" you can click
this link , type " playbook " into the
'Search' and all mentions of 'playbook' in the drops will come up.
The Democracy Playbook sets forth strategies and actions that supporters of liberal
democracy can implement to halt and reverse democratic backsliding and make democratic
institutions work more effectively for citizens. The strategies are deeply rooted in the
evidence: what the scholarship and practice of democracy teach us about what does and does not
work. We hope that diverse groups and individuals will find the syntheses herein useful as they
design catered, context-specific strategies for contesting and resisting the illiberal toolkit.
This playbook is organized into two principal sections: one dealing with actions that domestic
actors can take within democracies, including retrenching ones, and the second section
addressing the role of international actors in supporting and empowering pro-democracy actors
on the ground. [ Note: contains copyrighted material ].
Counter disinformation network can't revive the dead chicken of neoliberal ideology.
Neoliberal elite lost legitimacy and as such has difficulties controlling the narrative.
That's why all this frantic efforts were launched to rectify the situation.
Anti-Russian angle of Atlantic council revealed here quite clearly
The paper's biggest single recommendation was that the United States and EU establish a
Counter-Disinformation Coalition, a public/private group bringing together, on a regular basis,
government and non-government stakeholders, including social media companies, traditional
media, Internet service providers (ISPs), and civil society groups. The Counter-Disinformation
Coalition would develop best practices for confronting disinformation from nondemocratic
countries, consistent with democratic norms. It also recommended that this coalition start with
a voluntary code of conduct outlining principles and agreed procedures for dealing with
disinformation, drawing from the recommendations as summarized above.
In drawing up these recommendations, we were aware that disinformation most often comes from
domestic, not foreign, sources. 8 While Russian and other disinformation players are
known to work in coordination with domestic purveyors of disinformation, both overtly and
covertly, the recommendations are limited to foreign disinformation, which falls within the
scope of "political warfare." Nevertheless, it may be that these policy recommendations,
particularly those focused on transparency and social resilience, may be applicable to
combatting other forms of disinformation.
That's naive take. Wary knows quite a bit about Antifa. Most probably the key people are
iether FBI agents or informants. The problem is that he find Antifa activities politically
useful. That's why he does not want to shut it down. This again put FBI in the role of kingmaker,
like under Comey.
Also don't forget that Brennan faction of CIA is still in power and that means the "deep
state" still is in control like was the case during Mueller investigation.
In May of 2017, President Trump did the right thing and fired FBI Director James Comey, the
individual at the center of the attempt to overturn the 2016 election results. Comey
orchestrated the spying efforts on President Trump and his campaign, which included the FBI
improperly applying for four separate Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants to
eavesdrop on campaign aide Carter Page. He also authorized a politically motivated
investigation into Lt. General Michael Flynn and encouraged the entrapment of Flynn by his FBI
agents in an infamous White House interview.
Clearly, Comey was a disastrous FBI Director; however, the President made a terrible choice
when he replaced him with Christopher Wray, a bureaucrat who has not reformed the agency in any
meaningful way. He also seems to be incapable of identifying the real threats that are facing
the country.
In testimony on Thursday before the House Homeland Security Committee, Wray made a series of
remarkable claims. He stated that Antifa is not a group but is more of "an ideology or maybe a
movement." He also refused to identify Chinese efforts to interrupt the 2020 election and again
focused attention on activities from Russia.
With these remarks, Wray is doing the bidding of the Democrats and following their talking
points. Regarding Antifa violence, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY),
claimed it was a "myth."
Nadler has been in his congressional cocoon for too long. Antifa has been active for several
years, but since the death of George Floyd on May 25, it has intensified its activities around
the country. Millions of Americans have seen the frequent and disturbing video footage of
rioting and looting throughout the country. According to U.S. Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-TX),
"there have been more than 550 declared riots, many stoked by extremists, Antifa and the BLM
(Black Lives Matter) organization."
In his comments to Wray at the committee meeting, Crenshaw also noted the rioters have done
an extensive amount of damage. He stated that "between one and two billion dollars of insurance
claims will be paid out. That doesn't come close to measuring the actual and true damage to
people's lives, not even close."
Crenshaw is right as many of our urban areas, such as New York, Washington D.C.,
Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland among o
Bullet2354 Avery Bierce • 20 hours ago
Wayne Dupree: Why I, as a black man, am voting for Trump, along with a large number of people who consider themselves Democrats
New from
Weekend Edition
Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent books are Bernie and the Sandernistas: Field Notes From a Failed Revolution and The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink (with Joshua Frank) He can be reached at: [email protected] or on Twitter @ JSCCounterPunch .
November 4, 2020 © Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar
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